It’s back-to-school season and that means back-to-school shopping. The average family with children in grades K-12 spends around $670 on apparel, shoes, supplies and electronics. Clothing comprises more thana third of that amount. So when those clothes turn gray and dingy after several washes, you may think you’ve flushed your investment down the drain.
The Dingy Clothing Culprit
That clothing discoloration is just one indication that your home may have hard water. Faded colors, stiff and weakened fabrics are other tell tale signs. And those symptoms come with a cost. You may find yourself washing clothes more often to fix the problem, but that just leads to increased soap use. Ironically, hard water lessens soap effectiveness by up to 50 percent, so additional washes simply increase your costs.
When added to your laundry, special additives provide a quick, temporary solution. They bind to the hardness minerals and soften the water during the wash cycle. However, those additives are drained away with the wash water, leaving your clothes to be rinsed in hard water and undoing some of the additives’ benefits.
So what can you do to rid your home, and your clothing, of the underlying problem for good?
Protecting Those Back-to-School Clothes
A water softener, which removes the hard water minerals from your water, helps keep those expensive back-to-school clothing pristine while decreasing household cleaning solution costs by 40 percent annually.
To get started with a permanent solution, pick up a test strip from your nearest retailer, which will confirm if you have hard water. Once you know that answer, our easy questionnaire helps you determine the best water softener solution for your home. For example, how many loads of laundry do you do in a week? Once your new water softener is in place, we hope that number decreases, even with all those additional clothes that come with a new school year.
