Might be worth mentioning that there are chemicals that function in a similar way called chelating agents.
They’re usually compounds, ligands with slightly negative active groups that tend to bind to positively charged ions responsible for water hardness like calcium ions. They’re used in industrial uses, as medical treatments. Hell, even haemoglobin the stuff that carries oxygen around the body functions as a chelating agent – strongly binding to Fe2+ ions which in turn acts as a reversible binding agent of oxygen for you know, helping your body functions properly.
In ELI5 terms, they’re like little hooks or claws, many are shaped like the claw in a claw machine but instead of grabbing stuffed toys they grab onto heavy metal ions.
Used to work for a company that sold water softeners. One thing I didn’t see mentioned below is a lot of people complain *after* putting in a water softener that they don’t feel the water gets them ‘clean’ after a shower.
The reason apparently is all those dissolved minerals in the hard water act as a mild exfoliant, and without them, people feel like their skin is not being scrubbed.
And it is those tiny dissolved minerals are the real reason for getting a softener, IMHO. We have an ice maker in the fridge, a built-in coffee machine and a dishwasher. Hard water attacks all the seals in those devices, and over times, erodes them, causing leaks and other malfunctions.
The water softener is full of resin beads that like to grab onto the minerals that make water “hard.”
However, they eventually can’t hold any more minerals and need to be cleaned, so the water softener runs a salt water solution through the beads to rinse them off.
Then, the system is ready to use again.
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