Will Hard Water Affect a Float Tank? – DSP 165

Hard water is something that comes from having too many minerals in your water source. It can cause a lot of problems with plumbing if it’s too hard, and most buildings will have resources for dealing with this to help avoid calcium buildup in pipes and along tubs or pools. As for how it interacts with a float tank, specifically, it seems like the larger issue is going to be how it impacts the rest of your building.

Graham and Ashkahn break down what they know about how hard water affects float tanks and the differences you’re going to have to look out for if you’re using well water over municipal water sources.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: And today’s question is – actually questions are “hard or soft water? City or well water? For one tank only please.”  Well fortunately, those aren’t really going to change for multiple tanks.

Ashkahn: Yeah, they should be the same.

Graham: That’s the good news, yeah.

Ashkahn: Okay.

Graham: So there’s a difference between them.

Ashkahn: Between hard and soft water?

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah, should we explain what that is?

Graham: Yeah, I think we totally should.

Ashkahn: All right so hard and soft water’s usually referring to the amount of mineral content of your water. Hard water has a lot more minerals and metals and stuff like that in it and soft water doesn’t. Typically, I think there are some issues that come with having hard water. People usually want to have softer water. If you’re in a city with very hard water, you usually have a water softener. If you’re in a city with soft water, you don’t have a water hardener or something connected to your building or anything like that.

Graham: Yep. There are some things that come along with overly soft water, as well. But the interesting thing is this doesn’t really effect the float tanks themselves too much.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: It’s a lot of your other building appliances and things like that, especially if you’re filtering the water going into your float tanks which we fully recommend. If you don’t have a full point of entry building water filtration system, then at least filtering any drop of water that’s being added to your float tank when you’re topping it off or doing a full refill will often get rid of a lot of the minerals and different things you’re worried about building up and being deposited.

Ashkahn: So water hardness can affect pools and hot tubs and stuff like that. They’re often controlling their water hardness and measuring it every day because it can lead to scaling, that’s the term for … people are probably a little bit more used to seeing this in their showers in cities where they live with places with hard water, those buildups of calcium and lime and stuff like that that form that weird almost scummy looking surface thing that usually builds up on tiles or something. So pools and stuff, they can deal with that and it doesn’t look good aesthetically but also that scale can build up inside of pipes and that can constrict pipes and hurt your flow rates. It can also build up on the outside of things like your UV light, that sleeve glass tubes that the light bulbs are in can have scale building up on them. That means the UV light won’t be able to penetrate through that and it will hurt your UV ability. Or scale can build up on the heating elements of a heater and eventually damage those or make them less efficient.

Graham: Yeah, really common on hot water heaters. A lot of the time, the first times you’ll see an impact of having a really hard water going through anything in your system will be around the hot water heater and gathering on those elements or down on the little unions. The heat definitely because it can evaporate out water, gets the minerals just that much closer to coming out of the water and bonding to something else.

Ashkahn: But for some reason, we don’t see this happening in float tanks. Obviously, some reason to do with the Epsom salts but I don’t exactly know why. We tried looking into it and it gets to be some complicated chemistry out there.

Graham: We’re not scientists. We’re simple people.

Ashkahn: There seems to be some information about magnesium prohibiting calcium from really being able to form calcium deposits very easily.

Graham: Yeah like it’s crystalline structure gets disrupted by magnesium maybe if we’re reading these articles correctly.

Ashkahn: Here’s what I do know, I’ve never seen it happen in our float tanks. I haven’t seen it happen in anybody’s float tanks.

Graham: Or in our pipes or anywhere. It really does not seem like the hardness of the water, even if you’re not filtering the water going into your float tanks, has a big impact on the actual float system.

Ashkahn: So that part is pretty cool. It doesn’t seem like we have to worry about it that much, at least from what I know now and what’s been going on. Much more likely, you’re dealing with hard or soft water, probably just for normal things in your shop. Probably your showers are the biggest concern and your hot water heater that’s giving hot water to showers and your sinks and all the normal-

Graham: Bidets.

Ashkahn: -Non-float tank plumbing things that you’d have in your building are probably actually why you’d be trying to make sure you have a water softener if you have really hard water and dealing with that. Not a very float tank issue but still something you would have to deal with just because of the amount of other water fixtures that you have in your building.

Graham: For city versus well water, the advice just ends up being the same for both which is regardless, make sure you’re filtering it going into your float tank. Well water can end up with interesting minerals. City water is often has trace elements of chloramines for disinfection or bromides that they’re putting in there. You want to filter that stuff out but, again, you want to filter in either case. There’s nothing different that needs to happen as a result of having a different water source at all.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Probably not going to. As long as your well water is decent and there’s a lot of cities that can inspect wells and make sure everything looks good and how the well is set up. Only if you’re using a horrible well, it’s all weird and stuff, you might have problems but assuming that’s not the case, then you should be really fine both ways.

Graham: Yep. Watch out for, if you are in a well, that might mean you’re also on a septic system. That’s something to check in. Depending on the size of the system, especially the salt water, you can risk killing off the different bacteria that are making that system function. So I’d say that’s almost more of a concern than the water going into the tanks is what you’re doing with the water coming out on more of land use kind of level.

Ashkahn: Totally.

Graham: Cool.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Well thanks for the couple of questions.

Ashkahn: Yep. And if you have more questions, you can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

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