If there’s one thing more than anything else that you don’t need anywhere near your central heating system – it’s limescale!
Scale will insidiously avail itself in the pipework and the water tank, making it increasingly hard for the system to produce sufficient amounts of heat and hot water.
If you live in a part of the country where hard water is prevalent, all the time it is running through the mains supply, the problem of limescale will become increasingly worse.
Why is limescale so bad for your central heating?
Limescale is especially bad in situations where water is being heated and then left to cool down. So, the boiler and its working parts are going to bear the brunt of this, with guaranteed loss of efficiency.
It’s a bit like the way your kitchen kettle works. The element heats up when you boil the water and then cools down again. Have you noticed how white furring builds up around the element? That’s the gradual accumulation of limescale.
In a central heating system, there are pipes rather than an element, which flow between the boiler and the tank. Once the water is heated by the boiler, it flows to the hot water tank, ready to be used for whatever purpose.
Over the course of just a few months, limescale will form around the inside of the pipe that connects between the boiler and the tank. This means that although the boiler still performs its heating process, because of where the limescale is positioned, it is necessary to heat the scale before it can heat the water.
This accumulation just keeps building up – there’s nothing to stop it. This means that your poor old boiler has to work ever harder to produce the heat to satisfy your household needs.
But that’s not the only bad news – because limescale also accumulates on any pipework within the water tank itself. A once pristine water tank will gradually become inundated with scale, building up from the base of the tank until it gets to a point where a huge chunk of the tank’s storage capacity is lost. This not only reduces the available amount of hot water, it also means that the scale has to be heated before the water is!
All this accumulation means that you could quite easily be taking 2 or 3 hours of extra time and energy to effectively heat the water. Depending on the system you are running, you may find it runs cold before it has catered for the demand – because the tank’s capacity has been compromised by scale!
All in all, this is piling one problem upon another. The system will expend more and more energy – wasting large amounts of money in the meantime – whilst the boiler itself could downgrade in half the time it would take, if it wasn’t having to constantly battle against scale. And replacing a boiler will inevitably involve a hefty expense.
The best – and frankly only solution – is to have a water softener installed. It’s a one-off investment that will repay you handsomely in no time at all.
We sell the most affordable and reliable water softeners on the market today. Catering for all sizes of property – from apartments to large executive homes – MolliVita Water Softeners provide cost effective, soft water solutions for hard water areas right across the UK.
You can order online here or, should you want to speak to one of our friendly team, please feel free to call us on 01243 252360 or contact us by email: hello@mollivita.co.uk