Fixing Hard Water Problems

BYRON: Hi, Tom and Leslie. Yeah, every time I do my dishes the glasses dry and I notice there’s like a milky-white residue. And I was just trying to figure out what that is. I’m in a new house and don’t know what’s going on.

TOM: Do you notice that when you pour water it looks a little cloudy; or anything of that nature?

LESLIE: Are you having a hard time with soap sudsing up?

BYRON: A little bit of problems with soap sudsing up; but yes, the cloudiness in the water. If I’m drinking tap water I do notice that after a couple of seconds it is pretty cloudy.

TOM: Well, it sounds to me like you may have a hard water issue. That basically refers to having an excess amount of minerals in the water and that’s directly related to where your water comes from. So if you happen to have like sort of a stone quarry that your water comes from you’re going to have more hard water in it, typically, and it can occur with both well water as well as city water.

There are a couple of things that you can do. First of all, with respect to the dishwasher, there’s such a thing known as a rinsing agent and the most common one out there is a product called Jet-Dry and that goes in – most dishwashers have the rinsing agent dispenser built in. That leaves like sort of a coating on your glasses that makes the water evaporate quickly and I guess the way to explain is it’s sort of like Armor All for your drinking glasses; you know, the water runs – runs off but …

LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Yeah, it just sort of makes everything wash right off.

BYRON: (overlapping voices) OK.

TOM: Yeah, but it’s safe to use. And the other thing is that you might want to think about putting in a system to treat your hard water. Now, typically that’s done with salt-based treatments, but that’s kind of expensive and it takes some time and some expense for the plumbing to be installed. There’s another system out there, though, that we like – called EasyWater – that recently became a sponsor of this show, so we learned all about it. And basically, what EasyWater does is it uses an electronic technology, instead of salt or chemicals, to make sure that the minerals don’t stick and what that does, it helps it run off the glasses; it doesn’t clog up your faucets, your aerators, it doesn’t require any plumbing to install it. You simply install this near your main water valve and there’s sort of a wire that you wrap around the main water valve – not the valve, but the main water supply pipe –

LESLIE: The pipe itself.

TOM: Yeah, that sort of creates like a coil and essentially what happens is the treated minerals, once they go through this, kind of repel each other. They lose their electrostatic charge, which is what makes them stick to the faucets and stick to the glasses and stick to everything else.

BYRON: OK.

TOM: So once they go through this EasyWater treatment system they essentially lose that charge and then they don’t stick. So that’s a good option as well. So use the Jet-Dry. Think about putting in a hard water solution like EasyWater and I think that you’ll see that the water is going to clear up in your house.

BYRON: Now is the EasyWater something I can find at the home centers or online or where?

TOM: The easiest place to buy it is, frankly, right online. You can go to their website – it’s EasyWater.com – and talk with the folks over there. They’re very good at sort of walking you through the issue and making sure that this device is going to solve it once and for good.

BYRON: Awesome. Thanks. I love you guys’ show. You guys have bailed me out a couple of times.

TOM: Aw, you’re welcome, Byron. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.