this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Fabric softener is sometime useful for very hard water. You don't have to buy it, though. You can use white vinegar to soften the water to actually soften the fabric mix in a big container one part white vinegar to one part sodium bicarbonate. Wait for it to stop foaming. Add four drops of essential oils per liter of mixture. Stir. Allow to rest a few hour before using. You can make big quantity ahead of time as long as your container is big enough for the big foam of the big batch.
Speaking of hard water, I recently installed a water conditioner/descaler instead of replacing my dead water softener. It's an electronic device that mounts on the water supply pipe, and uses a couple of wire coils to create an electric field that makes the calcium ions in the hard water stick to each other instead of pipes and fixtures. I was skeptical, because the description of how it works sounds a lot like many woo-woo devices that use "magnetic fields" to do... something. But I read up on water descalers, and all of the information that I found was very straightforward, listing the pro's and con's of descalers versus softeners.
And it works! I checked the water utility reports for the wells which serve my area, and found that they're all "very hard," but quite low on manganese. Therefore, I don't mind that the minerals stay in the water; they just go down the drain instead of building up on things. It's actually starting to dissolve the scale buildup on my faucets, slowly. No need for vinegar to have soft fabric out of the laundry, either. I like that it descales all of the water in the house, so I don't have to bother about which is softened and which is not. It was also cheaper than a water softener, and I don't have to buy salt regularly. Also, it's an older house with galvanized pipes, which soft water will corrode.
Anyway, random aside on hard water.
Very interesting. Thank you for the advice (^_^)