5 Ways a Water Softener Will Benefit Your Health
You probably don’t think about your water that often. It is such an integral part of your life that it tends to just blend into the background. But hundreds of times a day, you depend on water to thrive. When you consider every exposure you have to water in a day, it’s no wonder that the quality of your water plays a crucial role in your home and your health. You can visibly see the effects of hard water on your shower fixtures. Does it make you wonder what it is doing to your body?
Hard water doesn’t create a health hazard, but it does have some unpleasant effects on your body. All the times you wash your hands, take showers, clean dishes, and drink water add up to more water contact than you can even imagine. Each use of hard water leaves you with more exposure to the pesky minerals and desperate for hard water solutions.
What makes your water hard is the mineral content. Calcium and magnesium, in particular, can be harsh on your home and your body. When you install a whole house water softener and filtration system, it uses salt to conduct an ion exchange process that swaps out the hard minerals in your water for soft ones. Before it ever reaches your tap, the composition of your water changes to make it more pleasant. While you often hear that softening your water provides the obvious benefits of protecting your pipes, preventing limescale, and eliminating hard water stains, soft water is also much more pleasant for your body.
Health Benefits of Adding a Water Softener to Your Home
1. Healthy Kidneys
Your kidneys act as a giant filter for your body. The more minerals floating through your bloodstream, the harder they must work to clean things up. When you drink large amounts of hard water, your kidneys need to work harder to filter out the calcium and magnesium in your hard water. These minerals can also build up in your kidneys and put you at risk of developing kidney stones. Drinking soft water eliminates the minerals that kick your kidneys into overdrive and can potentially form kidney stones.
2. Hydration
The more you enjoy your water, the more you will drink. Hard water notoriously smells and tastes horrible, causing a natural aversion to drinking it. A common solution is hiring a water service to deliver bottled drinking water to your home. However, a service is costly, time-consuming, and requires you to have a giant ugly water cooler in your home.
When you install a high-quality water softener and filter system on your home, it does the hard work of filtering out all the nasty things that make your water taste bad. The result is clean, refreshing water straight to your tap. Delicious water means you will drink more of it, leaving you perfectly hydrated. The benefits of hydration are endless because every system in your body requires water. Benefits of proper hydration include improved digestion, clear-headedness, increased energy, clear skin, and protection for your joints and soft tissues.
3. Glowing Skin
If you struggle with skin issues that just won’t resolve, it’s worth testing the water in your home. Hard water notoriously wreaks havoc on your skin. Whether you struggle with acne, eczema, or psoriasis, your water may be the culprit.
Hard water interferes with the performance of the soaps you use every day. You will notice that after you bathe in hard water, you feel like the soap is sticking to your skin. This is because the minerals in water interact with your soaps to make them less effective and leave behind a film on your skin. This film is the culprit for many skin issues.
Depending on your skin type, the minerals’ effects can manifest in various ways. The build-up on your skin may clog your pores, resulting in blackheads and acne, or cause your skin to dry out, leading to itching and flaking. Hard water can even enhance the symptoms of eczema or psoriasis.
4. Beautiful Hair
Hard water may be to blame for your bad hair days for the same reason it wrecks your skin. The products you use on your hair play a significant role in its health. Hard water allows the products to build up, resulting in dull, limp, and brittle hair. The build-up can even weigh down the roots causing it to look flat and thin.
The amount of water you expose your hair to means that, over time, hard water can lead to a lot of frustration. Many people suffer from dry or brittle hair since the moisture they try to give it isn’t effective because of their water. In extreme cases, hard water and product build-up can even harm your scalp and contribute to hair loss.
5. Eliminate Germs
A clean home is the foundation for a healthy family, and water is crucial to keeping your home clean. Your cleaners and detergents depend on water to work effectively. Hard water interacts with household cleaners to make them less effective, meaning your cleaning products aren’t operating at peak efficiency.
Soft water will help ensure that your home is as clean as possible and reduce the chances of bacteria and viruses living on your surfaces.
While soft water isn’t crucial to survival, it definitely makes life much more comfortable. Whether you are tired of bad hair days or looking to reduce the risk of kidney stones, the easy solution is installing a whole-house water filtration and softener system in your home. In just a few hours, your hard water will be gone, and you will be more hydrated and healthy than ever.
