50 Comments

  1. You should have flushed the whole house by pumping vinegar through the pipes one fixture at a time. If you have a tankless water heater you should have read that already that it is a maintenance procedure for a tankless water heater.

  2. Yep, i’d have left it for longer and waited for all the limescale to work its way out. The bonding just changes the way it sticks to a surface, it doesn’t remove the calcium.

  3. I was really hoping it would have worked. I’m a custodian at a school. The calcium in the water is very bad.

  4. Simple solution for your drinking water: Install a whole house water softener (you wouldn’t go back to hard water after 6 months). Then re-plumb the cold-water-side of the kitchen sink as a hard-water feed. Usually it’s an easy swap back near the beginning of the plumbing. Then drink/cook water out of the cold-side of the kitchen faucet. Then you preserve the taste you like. Easy for a DIY guy to do. Or some people will run a brand new hard-water 1/2" line and install a separate "drinking water only" small faucet next to the kitchen sink fixture. Either way.

    The water softener will pay for itself eventually when you figure the time/energy to clean your tankless heater, or if you get a tank electric heater (you probably eventually will). Tankless are high maintenance, and a lot of no-hot-water hassles IMO… Best of luck!

  5. DeScalers work by ionizing the water, the scale is still there, it just turns it to a powder and makes it easier to clean your shower door, etc.

  6. Water softeners DO NOT add salt to the water you come in contact with. This is an uneducated myth. They us brine (salt water) to clean the media that "pull" and hold the minerals from your water. When the media is saturated valves upon up and flush brine through the media flushing the unwanted minerals down the sewer. Then water flushes the brine from the media, the valves close and the process starts all over again. If you want un-softened water to drink then run a line from prior to the softener to a point of use faucet in your kitchen. In fact in the Midwest almost all new construction provides un-softened cold water to the kitchen by default.

  7. You needed to try it on the backside of the water heater….i installed two the first one on an incoming line and the second was larger on the back side of our tankless heater. It worked.

  8. I believe that you had the wrong expectations. These devices remove nothing. They simply change the characteristics of the water so that build up is "reduced". I’ve used these devices in my house when I lived in Clearwater Florida, and when I lived in Kansas city, MO. The hardness in Florida was very high compared to KC, MO. However, the properly installed devices worked well. Just keep your expectations within the actaul performance of reduction and not removal.

  9. Ive had this same unit for years. I believe it works but it isnt going to work that fast. It reduces limescale over time. My washing machine used to malfunction due to limescale buildup. It still happens but nowhere near like it used to. It took quite a few years b4 i noticed a difference. At least 5 years or more

  10. I would expect there to be scaling still for a couple months… your soap test told me all I need to know though, thanks!

  11. Farm Dad, you didn’t wait long enough. Your pipes will actually have more buildup in the early weeks due to the system breaking up all the scale inside your pipes. After many weeks, maybe months, that stops.

  12. I know you’re against W Softeners, but they’re actually kind of fun to fix (free ones) and play with. You have a little chemistry action happening in your mech room. In our rural area people literally toss perfectly good water softeners that anyone can pick up for free at our local recycling center (the dump). Esp in the spring/summer. Or local online ads there are often real cheap ones. The vast majority of time they just need cleaning and maintenance. The plastic beads inside last a long time in rural areas (beads don’t like chlorine). I’ve taken some free softeners, that I’ve installed for relatives. Tip: get one with a separate salt tank. The all-in-one’s salt-bridge a lot which is unnecessary goofing around. The wider the tank (18"+) the better — no salt bridges.

    Manual control heads are just fine. You can dial them in (extend the time to recharge) for lowest salt use for your needs like an electronic head. Most people routine doesn’t vary much, so if you optimize you can get it ‘just right’. Or buy a new electronic head for $180 online. You’re DIY, you’d probably like the mechanical nature of them. It’s actually a valuable skill to have — knowing how the different styles operate, & how to repair the different style heads. They’re simple, but to most people they’re voo-doo. I get a lot of questions on W/S’s. I would probably get one with a plastic rotary head, or an older style with a cam & brass/rubber finger-valves. They can go a long time (decades?) w/o service. Parts are avail. Culligan’s are good, but every few yrs the plunger seals should be lubed to prevent having to buy a new ($) plunger. Culligan parts are avail locally which is nice, but not particularly cheap.

    My buddy for 15 years didn’t want one for xyz reasons. Mostly being bull-headed, which he freely admits. Then his wife made him put one in. Plus he got tired of hard water issues. Now, several yrs after he says he can’t believe he resisted for so long. The slimy water is actually getting all the soap off. We all have things like that…me too πŸ™‚

    Note: Have you tried a Calmat Electronic Anti-Scale unit? Menards sells them (maybe Lowes too??) ..if you have one near you.

  13. Im not a water professional but I think you better to test your water first so you have an idea how hard its then make decision if you need install two Electronic Descalers even more…

  14. I wonder if a whole home sediment filter installed after this would eliminate the early excessive debris as it breakers down the scale.

  15. I found that my unit was actually dissolving the deposits that were already in the pipes, once they cleared In about 2-3 months all was great. I don’t know how long your pipes had previously been in use…..mine were 30 yrs old.

  16. I appriciate your video and the testing you di. Did you happen to think the scale you were still seeing was the result of the pipes getting Descaled?
    I am asking because I had a similar situation and I waited longer. After a 6-8 month period of time I stopped having to clean off my screens in my water lines because all the rocks that were clinging to my pipes were cleaned out. Just a thought. Mine works well now.

  17. At the beginning, how does he sound like he’s in an empty room or cellar though he’s outside? I’ve never heard that before.

  18. Water softeners don’t ADD salt to your water.

    They do use salt during a media(tank beads that attract the deposits) cleaning process.

    Nice video!

  19. The sand you are getting in the pipes is not going to be solved by a descaler. You should add a particle filter. These work by catching the particles while water is running and them dropping them down into a drain which you have to empty regularly.

  20. as a water treatment professional here in WI for 30 years…. I laugh at the majority of the comments in this section

  21. Obviously you don’t fully understand how a water descaler works. It takes a whole lot more time to clean out the pipes and mineral scale your showing in your video. Remember, this device is a descaler not a water softener. Part of it’s job is to clean out the plumbing and maintain that status.

  22. You actually did it wrong. So the conditioning only lasts a short period of time so you want to install it after the water heater not before. It’s meant to condition water that will be used right away.

  23. I think Polyphosphate filter would help you to protect this issue before installing that you should install one more 5 micron sediment bag, this will help you to reduce the scaling issue. But this is a water conditioning method not a softener, if you want to make your water as soft water you should go with some ion exchange method, i think there is water softener available in Kent. But for a water softener method, you should do water regenerating technique using Rock salt. So do proper cost analysis and go with it.

  24. Almost twenty years ago we moved from a lake water area to a town that uses town wheal water that has hard water. Unaware of its effect and the need of water softener in the area after first year our dishwasher completely clogged up and broken down while the pipes began to clog up with scale build up all over the kitchen, washrooms toilets and faucets. I did some research regarding water softener and ended up using a electronic water descaler. The heavy scales in the washroom, faucets, inside the toilet tank and the buildup in the toilet bowls dramatically decreased after the initial clean up right after the installation after six months; however, I was still wondering how well it really worked throughout the entire house since we no longer have a dishwasher to show the difference. An year after the installation, our rental hot water heater tank broke down and I was wondering if it was caused by the hard water buildup and the electronic water descaler may not be enough to do the job; however, when the maintance person showed up and pull out the heating rod and it was perfectly clean without any trace of scale and the hot water tank was simply just broken down. The maintenance person was baffled since we did not have a water softener installed and had never heard of a electronic water descaler in his 30 years in the hot water tank business in our area. Least to say beside the minor wipe down and light regular scrub we no longer have any major hard water scale build up issue throughout the house since we installed the first unit and it actually slowly descaled all the scales in the water pipe throughout the entire house with an yearly electricity cost of about $7.00 drawing 5W/h only to operate it. five years later, I added a second unit onto the out going hot water pipe leaving from the hot water tank to add additional descale performance and have both units plugged into a backup battery unit as a safety measure and both are still running well to this day.

  25. Yo FarmDadπŸ‘‹ I’ve got a question for you OR anyone else who may know… Is it ok to use more than 1 of these Descalers, would it be beneficial ❓

  26. Only one system on the planet removes TDS and that’s resin based with salt for cleaning the resin beads. The salt is not going into your water. It’s backwashed to the drain.

  27. I bought a GE water softener from Home Depot and installed it myself, best $400 dollars I ever spent. I have a 4 bedroom house. 2 humans, 3 dogs, 9 birds. I go through 20 bags of salt a year with extremely hard water. Costs about $200 a $400 a year for salt

  28. This type of descaler needs 2 or 3 months to really show its effectiveness, especially with pipes as built up as yours, after which you will not notice anymore buildup in areas such as faucet ends and your pipes. What happens is the treated water will start to descale the the buildup in your pipes and will cause more of the rocky particulate during the first few months until it is all gone. After that the unit will prevent this buildup from happening. I have had one for 8 years and love it because it doesn’t add sodium to the water and it keeps the minerals in the water which is beneficial for the body if you are drinking and cooking with it. I may eventually get a water softener to prevent water spots on my faucets. But will leave my cold kitchen water unsoftened but descaled for this reason.

  29. After discussing this with someone who owns a similar device for a longer period. I think the device is working and you have demonstrated that it does.

    5:39 See the buildup in that tap aerator filter or at the inlet valve of your washing machine ?

    To me, that suggests it’s working as it got the scale in the water to clump up where it could be caught in a filter. The reason there is so much of it is simply because of the volume of water that passes through.

    Now, the test, if this hypothesis works, is after you discontinued the use of the gadget whether you still see a similar amount of buildup within the same time period in your tap aerator filter and washing machine inlet as when you were using it?

  30. I’ve read that if you have over 0.3 ppm iron in your water you need a filter for removing iron. The iron interferes with electromagnetic frequencies, just something else to check out.

  31. Just get a good water softener. I know you "said" there are a couple reasons why you don’t like them, but when I was a little child I didn’t like wearing shoes, but I wore them anyways and glad now that I did. πŸ˜‚

  32. This was not a 3 month unbiased test, this was a 3 month uneducated test. If you have build up in the pipes, its going to work loose over time and continue to leave loose deposits at your tap. anyone with half a brain would know it could take more then 3 months of using the unit to rid the plumbing of the buildup.

  33. What you have at the end of your aerators and your hoses is the scale that’s come off because it’s working.
    It’s good to follow up 3 months later and clean everything out with a Thorough flush.
    You didn’t have a homeostatic environment by which to test your methods, you didn’t account for variables and your science is a failure.πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚
    I’m not trying to give you a ton of s*** like that’s legitimately what’s going on here.

  34. That was all the crap stuck inside your lines it was working you just needed to clean it out. It was freeing and everything up that was stuck in there. At least that’s what the people that sell them say. Thank you

  35. Dude, love your efforts. But could you have at least did a little research before you turned 100’s maybe thousands of potential clients off of this product. You need to run a large sediment filter ahead of everything else. There is very little and electronic descaling device can do with chunks that size coming from your well. Another words you’ve got the wrong tool, or the wrong indicators for testing the effectiveness of your new electronic, scale device. Thanks for the effort though.

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