If your home has hard water, you might deal with the problem by using laundry additives that soften water, or by adding a water softening cartridge to your shower head. While those products might work as intended, they do nothing about solving your hard water problem.

Hard water is especially harmful to plumbing pipes since mineral scale keeps building up year after year. Talk to your plumber about an effective hard water treatment for your whole house and plumbing. They might recommend a water softener. Here's how it can help.

A Water Softener Treats All Of Your Water

The plumber can install a water softener so all the water in your home is treated. You won't need to use water-softening laundry additives any longer, or add gadgets to your shower.

Every faucet will have softened water, unless you have a specific area you don't want to be treated, such as your kitchen sink. Since water is softened with salt, you may want to bypass your kitchen sink if you use it to get your drinking water, or if you are on a salt-restricted diet.

The Soft Water Protects Your Plumbing

The insides of plumbing pipes aren't the only things affected by hard water. Hard water can affect your water heater too and cause it to wear out sooner. Mineral scale can even affect plumbing connections and valves and cause them to get stuck together. That could be a major inconvenience if you need to turn off a water valve in an emergency.

Hard water also harms your clothes washer, dishwasher, and small appliances that use water, such as a coffee pot. You may notice a scaly ring in a glass coffee pot, and that's the scale left behind by hard water. The same scale leaves residue behind on everything water touches, and the scale accumulates over time in places where you can't clean it off.

Soft Water Makes It Easier To Clean Your House

Hard water leaves scaly spots behind on faucets, your shower walls, and even your dishes and glasses. This means you have to work harder to have a clean and shiny home. It's frustrating to live with hard water and always see water spots and scale in your bathroom, and sometimes it's difficult to remove. All those problems go away when you have a water softener installed.

You'll have to maintain the softener by adding salt to it when needed, but a softener is easy to use and take care of. You can find companies that rent the units as well as sell them. Some companies even deliver salt so you don't have to carry it home from the store yourself.