Like many homeowners, you may spend hours every day in the kitchen cooking, cleaning, and performing other tasks. However, you may not realize how the hard water in your home negatively impacts these activities and your kitchen appliances.
Read on to learn about just three of the many advantages you can look forward to after installing a water softener in your home.
- Cleaner Dishes
If your dishes tend to come out of your dishwasher with food particles still stuck to them, spotted, or completely covered in a white film, then you may suspect that your dishwasher itself is to blame for these problems. However, these problems are common when dishes are washed in hard water, whether the dishwasher they are washed in is old or new.
Several factors can cause dishes washed in hard water to come out of the dishwasher less clean than dishes washed in soft water. First, hard water can diminish the effectiveness of many types of cleaning products, including dishwasher detergents.
In addition, when dishes are rinsed in hard water and then allowed to dry, the excess dissolved minerals in the hard water can remain on the surface of the dishes in the form of white spots or a white film after water itself evaporates.
Finally, over time, hard water minerals can build up on dishwasher cleaning and heating elements, hindering the performance of these important dishwasher parts.
After you install a water softener in your home, you will likely notice that the dishes you remove from the dishwasher are suddenly much cleaner than before and, when washing dishes in soft water, you can even reduce the amount of expensive dishwashing detergent that you add to each load.
- Better Cooking Results
If you enjoy cooking, but your cooked dishes never seem to turn out exactly how you would like them to, then you may be surprised to hear that some of the problems you face when cooking may actually be caused by the hard water in your kitchen.
When making baked goods, the extra minerals in hard water can affect the performance of yeast by interrupting its fermentation process. These minerals also chemically react with the gluten in wheat flour in a way that can hinder baking results.
In addition, vegetables cooked in hard water tend to become much tougher than those cooked in soft water, and rice cooked with hard water can turn out hard instead of soft and fluffy.
Finally, cooking any type of food or beverage in or with hard water can affect its taste; the extra minerals in this water, including calcium and magnesium, can lend an off taste to many foods and beverages, including coffee and tea.
After you equip your home with a water softener, you may notice an improvement in your baked goods and the everyday foods you prepare for your family.
- Longer Appliance Lifespan
When you make the switch from hard water to soft water in your kitchen, you can also reap long-term benefits along with the immediate benefits. One of these long-term benefits is a potential increase in the lifespan of your kitchen appliances.
When hard water mineral deposits build up inside of kitchen faucets, this build-up can not only reduce the flow of water out of your faucet, but the corrosive nature of these minerals can also degrade faucet metal components, greatly shortening their lifespans.
When washing dishes with hard water, minerals can build up on the dishwasher metal heating element, reducing its efficiency. When the efficiency of this element is reduced, it must work harder to heat up, which can shorten its lifespan. In fact, the average lifespan of a dishwasher increases from 7 years to 10 years when it is used with only soft water.
After adding a water softener to your home, you can look forward to these benefits in the kitchen along with better-tasting water right out of your faucet. Contact the water treatment experts at RainSoft and A&B Marketing for all of your home water softener needs today.
