Water Quality Improvement Professional
The most common driver of accelerated anode consumption is elevated electrical conductivity in the water, not the mere presence of sodium ions (or the absence of Calcium).
I have been solving corrosion problems for three decades, from residential systems in Utah to mission-critical industrial and institutional systems on multiple continents.
The corrosion-mechanism is not mysterious once you understand what is happening at the electrode interface inside your water heater.
Ion exchange trades calcium and magnesium for sodium (or potassium) on an equivalent basis. The resin does not know or care whether the water started at 5 or 55 grains per gallon. It swaps one equivalent of hardness for one equivalent of sodium each time. The average is about 7.5 milligrams per liter of sodium added for every grain per gallon of hardness removed.
A village newsletter landed on my desk recently, and the headline was bold enough to make anyone reach for their softener bypass valve: “YOU MUST(more…)
Scaling is what happens when a sparingly soluble salt exceeds its capacity to stay dissolved and precipitates out onto whatever surface is nearby: a membrane, a heat exchanger tube, the inside of a boiler, the element in a water heater.
Your water supply is either supporting your metabolic health or quietly undermining it. Most people think about insulin resistance in terms of what they eat and how much they move. Those things matter enormously, but there’s a third variable almost nobody talks about: what they drink, and specifically, what’s dissolved in it.
The ideal condition for drinking water is no bacteria at all because the presence of bacteria of any type means there is a potential pathway(more…)