Plumbing Advice
Phoenix Hard Water: What It's Doing to Your Plumbing
By Kenneth Parks ·
If you've lived in Phoenix for more than a month, you've met hard water. It's the white crust on the shower door, the spots on the glasses, the ring of scale around every faucet, and the reason your dishwasher looks foggy inside. What most people don't realize is that the same stuff is building up in places you can't see, and that's where it costs money.
What "Hard" Actually Means
Hard water is water with a lot of dissolved calcium and magnesium in it. Phoenix gets its water mostly from the Salt, Verde and Colorado rivers, which pick up minerals from the rock they flow through, and by the time it reaches your tap it's well into the range the water industry calls "very hard." The city treats it and it's safe to drink. Treatment doesn't remove hardness, though, and that's not a flaw; hardness isn't a health issue. It's a plumbing issue.
When hard water is heated or evaporates, the minerals come out of solution and stick to whatever surface they're touching. That's scale.
Where the Scale Ends Up
Water heaters take the worst of it. Scale settles on the bottom of a tank heater and builds into a layer of rock between the burner and the water. The heater has to run longer to get the same result, the tank bottom overheats, and the unit dies years early. That popping or rumbling sound from a water heater is water boiling under a layer of scale. Tankless heaters get scale inside the heat exchanger, which throws error codes and cuts efficiency until it's descaled.
Inside the water heater, hard water shows up as sediment that steals tank capacity and makes the shower go cold early. See how we diagnose that and the other causes in why your hot water runs out so fast.
Faucets and shower heads clog at the aerator and the spray holes. Cartridges inside the faucet seize up. Toilet fill valves and flappers wear faster. Dishwashers and washing machines get scale on their heating elements and valves, and the manufacturer's expected life gets shorter.
Inside the pipes, scale narrows the opening over time. It's slow, but in a house that's 40 or 50 years old with original galvanized pipe, it's a real part of why the pressure is bad.
What Doesn't Work
Vinegar soaks on the shower head work for the shower head. They don't do anything for the water heater. "Salt-free softeners" and magnetic gadgets that clamp on the pipe don't remove hardness; at best some of them change how scale forms, and the results are inconsistent. Draining and flushing the water heater once a year helps a lot and is worth doing, but it's maintenance, not a fix.
What Does
A water softener. It replaces the calcium and magnesium with sodium or potassium as the water enters the house, so the water that reaches your heater, fixtures and appliances doesn't make scale. It's the one thing that addresses the cause instead of the symptoms. A properly sized softener typically pays for itself in longer appliance life, less cleaning, less soap and detergent, and the water heater you don't replace at year eight.
If your issue is taste rather than scale, that's a job for a reverse osmosis system at the kitchen sink, or a whole-home carbon filter for chlorine. Plenty of Phoenix homes end up with a softener for the house and RO for the drinking water.
How to Find Out Where You Stand
Test the water. We do it free when we're at your house, and it takes five minutes: hardness, chlorine, dissolved solids, pH. If you already have a softener and still see scale, it's probably not working, and that's worth a look before it costs you a water heater.
Free water test and softener installation