Making Water Soft – WaterIcon’s Water Softener System

From using huge boulders of porous rock to rudimentary sediment filters and crushed charcoal, small stones and sand, humans have been experimenting with water for thousands of years to achieve maximum purity of this precious commodity.

Water Softener System

As the availability of this irreplaceable resource dwindles across the globe, WaterIcon has surpassed these basic filtration methods by improving and perfecting processes and has stood up to the challenge to purify every drop of it across the continent of Africa. A large part of this process is converting the liquid from a hard to a soft state by using their very own water softener system.

Challenges of Using Hard State H2O

Being in its hard state means that the liquid is rich in calcium and magnesium. These ions are added to H2O over centuries as it dissolves and erodes minerals and rocks. Although drinkable in this hard state, it is best to remove these ions for many different reasons.

Without WaterIcon’s water softener system in residential settings, a surplus of these ions can cause scale build-up which slows the heating processes of the liquid and increases power usage. Laundry might become discoloured and brittle, detergents and cleaning chemicals will not work as effectively and walls, glass and plastics might build up unpleasant scale films. Personal hygiene is also affected as, in its hard state, H2O won’t clean one’s body as effectively and hair could feel unclean, stiff and dry.

Industrially, these ions can cause significantly more damage. Calcification and scale build-up can cause damage to source feed pipes, distilling equipment, pumps, boilers and plumbing equipment. This, in turn, increases costs because of parts replacements and labour-intensive cleaning and sterilisation processes. These costs are, more often than not, passed on to the consumer, directly affecting the cost of living. Introducing our water softener system to remove these ions would alleviate most of these problems.

How it works

In layman’s terms, WaterIcon’s water softener system is an ion exchange device. Ion exchange is simply taking the hard ions of calcium and magnesium out of the liquid and replacing them with soft ions. The most practical way of doing this is to introduce salt (sodium chloride) or brine-loaded ions to the hard H2O. This is done by adding microporous exchange resin beads that are supersaturated with salt which lightly coats the beads’ surfaces.

As the liquid passes through the resin beds, the hard ions attach to the beads and the loosely-held salt ions are released into the water. The ion-exchanged beads are then flushed with a sodium brine wash and the H2O is left soft.

To find out more about this fascinating procedure and our water softener system, visit our website or contact WaterIcon, Africa’s leading water purifier supplier, directly.