Using a Hach Hardness Kit to Test Your Water for Hardness and to Check Your Water Softener

In most homes the water supply is treated in a bulk treatment processing plant and is then sent through pipes to your homes and businesses. There are still a large number of people who own and operate their own small water supply called a well. These water sources can vary so widely that there have literally been thousands of volumes published on the topic and people have been trying to improve their water for thousands of years.

Here in northeast Ohio we typically have moderately hard water with plenty of iron to deal with. The hardness is responsible for scaling up our faucets and clogging the fill valves in our toilet tanks. The iron can be responsible for staining our clothes, and fixtures, plus it can taste really bad in your beverages.

There is a secondary problem with iron and it is an iron loving bacteria which mixes with dissolved oxygen and this chemical reaction oxidizes the ferrous (dissolved) iron in your water turning it into an insoluble iron called ferric oxide. this iron tastes bad and makes a slime which is often a yellow, red, orange, or reddish brown stain which is deposited on our fixtures and clothes.

Iron bacteria can make some awful smells while performing its various life cycle processes. This smell can be exaggerated once this goes through the hot water tank because at first the bacteria flourish there then they die off and this causes a reaction with the anode rod in your hot water tank.

Iron bacteria can in turn help to create an optimal environment for sulfur bacteria to thrive and then you will end up with the rotten egg sulfur smell that can gag most people if it is in high enough concentrations. There are definitely a number of ways to treat all of the nuisances in our water and we will go over them in another article another day. This article is intended to deal with water hardness primarily and how to test your water for hardness.

First off if you have moderately hard water and no softener then it would take a little bit of time before you grew accustomed to the difference with your water if you added a softener. If you have hard water and iron then odds are you already decided that you cannot take it and have some sort of treatment system even if it is just for treating the iron.

So how do you know when your water is hard? Typical hardness is usually considered to be two main specific dissolved minerals, calcium and magnesium which can cause problems with plumbing fixtures and other devices such as coffee brewers and dishwashers. The hardness scale that can build up is difficult to remove and can cause problems with the soaps in our hair and skin care products plus the laundry and dish washing processes can suffer as well.

A simple lather test can tell you roughly when your water is getting harder than it should be. The simplest test you will ever do is when you lather up any kind of soap in hard water it will take more and more soap to even begin making any foam. The harder the water the worse this lack of foaming will be. This is also synonymous with soap scum on your tub and shower walls. With your softener working properly this test will never be required because you will have plenty of lather.

I prefer to know exactly how hard the water is so I use the "Hach 5B Total Hardness test kit" which gives you a "grains per gallon" quantification of the total hardness in your water. One grain per gallon is equivalent to 17.1 mg/L hardness which helps you calculate water usage and salt settings through your softener.

The higher the GPG reading then the fewer gallons can go through your softener before it has to go through a cleaning cycle where the resin is washed with sodium chloride. The capacity of your resin tank is based on how many pounds of salt are used and this is extrapolated into a total grains capacity value in the resin.

For example if you have a softener that uses 15 pounds of salt per regeneration and the resin capacity is 30 thousand grains per cubic foot and your softener contains one cubic foot of resin then you can pass thirty thousand grains worth of water through before needing another cleaning. Therefore if your water tests out at 10 GPG hardness then you can have about 3000 gallons of water go through the softener before it need to be regenerated again. This is overly simplified and a certain safety factor is always left behind to prevent breakthrough at the end of a service cycle.

To test your raw water find a sample point that comes directly off the main water supply pipe before any treatment is performed on the water. This test will tell you how hard the water is coming into the home.

1) Take the mixing bottle out of the Hach 5B kit and fill it three times with water then pour from this square bottle three times into the small clear test tube.

2) Next put one level scoop of the UniVer 3 hardness reagent powder into the square mixing bottle along with one test tube of sample water and shake the bottle for 15 seconds or until all the pink crystals are dissolved.

3) Now you will use the hardness 3 Titration solution one drop at a time while swirling the mixing bottle watching for the color to change from pink to blue. If it is blue right away and no drops are required then your water is soft.

4) Count the drops and that is your grains per gallon of total hardness in your raw water. This can be useful to show you how much salt may be required per month or how many gallons can be processed before a regeneration cycle is required.

To sample the softened water find the nearest cold water tap after the softener and draw a new sample into the mixing bottle and flush it three times to clear out old sample. Now repeat the steps 1, 2, and 3 above.

If the sample is pink for more than a few drops then your softener is either being overrun or the salt usage during regeneration is not sufficient. The resin could be loaded with iron and a resin replacement or cleaning may be in order. I would typically run a regeneration cycle and measure salt drum level before and after a regeneration then check the capacity dial on the controller to make sure everything is set correctly. One thing people are not usually aware of is that the resin has a limited life span and can be spent to the point of replacement in five to seven years. If you get ten years out of the resin you cold consider yourself lucky.

Re-testing the water after the regeneration has been done calls for running sufficient amount of water through the piping to get clean water to the closest tap that you can find after the softener and then following the steps listed above 1, 2, and 3.

You can find a local water treatment company who may be willing to test your water for free and the trade off may simply be having a salesperson perform a demonstration for you to show what their water systems can do for you. The worse case you may learn something about your water that you did not know and also you may find that they have exactly what you have been looking for. In order to learn as much as you possibly can just ask a lot of questions and if you are on a budget see if they rent with option to buy.

Good luck and please check back to see more articles on water treatment her on my Associated Content page.