imp
Assistant Cook
Your domestic water supply......do you drink it, cook with it, only flush and shower with it? Asking, just to compare our own situation.
Mohave Desert, arid, hot, parched, yet we live here and have abundant water derived from private company-owned water suppliers. Ours is Bermuda Water Co. The wells supplying our house are 1 mile away, visible up on a hill about 100 feet higher than we are. The water is quite hard, as desert water always is, tastes good (to me), and we use it for everything except making coffee: the water will stop-up an electric coffee-maker's feed mechanism in only a few months. So, we buy bottled only for coffee!
Went to a home show several years ago; my wife gave a water softening guy our phone number. He came out and tested our tap water. Hardness 38 Grains, Total Dissolved Solids 1700 parts per million. He recommended a salt-type softener, but we balked. I needed to know more, never understood "Water Hardness". You want to?
First, there's all kinds of stuff dissolved in water: that's the 1700 ppm number. 38? The industry uses Grains per Gallon of Calcium and Magnesium only to call out "hardness". Means little to the layman. Those "Grains" are standard weight units, there being 7000 grains in ONE pound. So, our water has 38/7000 pounds of Calcium and Magnesium dissolved in it, or about 0.0054 lbs. per gallon. A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds, so our water has .0054 / 8 = 0.000678 pounds of Ca & Mg in it: 678 parts per million.
What about the rest, 1700 minus 678? All sorts of stuff, iron, copper, aluminum, various minerals other than Ca & Mg, about 1022 ppm of "other", hopefully not mercury, arsenic, etc.
City of Chicago was always said to have very hard water......I grew up drinking it. So I checked: Hardness about 50 Grains per Gallon, slightly more than our tap water here. Theirs comes from Lake Michigan, ours from some Aquifer underground.
Why call out only Calcium and Magnesium when citing "hardness"? I dunno, 'cause neither is particularly harmful, Magnesium is an essential nutrient for humans, Calcium, obviously, is also, for the bones. So, how is your water? Satisfactory? Use it for cooking? Me, I like drinking distilled water, like it's taste, but that's another story.
Mohave Desert, arid, hot, parched, yet we live here and have abundant water derived from private company-owned water suppliers. Ours is Bermuda Water Co. The wells supplying our house are 1 mile away, visible up on a hill about 100 feet higher than we are. The water is quite hard, as desert water always is, tastes good (to me), and we use it for everything except making coffee: the water will stop-up an electric coffee-maker's feed mechanism in only a few months. So, we buy bottled only for coffee!
Went to a home show several years ago; my wife gave a water softening guy our phone number. He came out and tested our tap water. Hardness 38 Grains, Total Dissolved Solids 1700 parts per million. He recommended a salt-type softener, but we balked. I needed to know more, never understood "Water Hardness". You want to?
First, there's all kinds of stuff dissolved in water: that's the 1700 ppm number. 38? The industry uses Grains per Gallon of Calcium and Magnesium only to call out "hardness". Means little to the layman. Those "Grains" are standard weight units, there being 7000 grains in ONE pound. So, our water has 38/7000 pounds of Calcium and Magnesium dissolved in it, or about 0.0054 lbs. per gallon. A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds, so our water has .0054 / 8 = 0.000678 pounds of Ca & Mg in it: 678 parts per million.
What about the rest, 1700 minus 678? All sorts of stuff, iron, copper, aluminum, various minerals other than Ca & Mg, about 1022 ppm of "other", hopefully not mercury, arsenic, etc.
City of Chicago was always said to have very hard water......I grew up drinking it. So I checked: Hardness about 50 Grains per Gallon, slightly more than our tap water here. Theirs comes from Lake Michigan, ours from some Aquifer underground.
Why call out only Calcium and Magnesium when citing "hardness"? I dunno, 'cause neither is particularly harmful, Magnesium is an essential nutrient for humans, Calcium, obviously, is also, for the bones. So, how is your water? Satisfactory? Use it for cooking? Me, I like drinking distilled water, like it's taste, but that's another story.
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