Why plumbing around Royston and the South East wears out faster, and what you can do about it.
Royston sits on the chalk hills where Hertfordshire meets Cambridgeshire, and most of the drinking water across Hertfordshire, and the wider South East around London, is drawn from chalk groundwater. As rain filters down through that chalk it dissolves calcium and magnesium, and it carries them straight into your pipes.
That is what hard water is. The water companies serving this area class the supply as hard to very hard, among the hardest in Britain. It is perfectly safe to drink. Your plumbing is the thing that suffers.
Every time hard water is heated, or left to stand, it drops some of its minerals as limescale. Gradually, quietly, scale builds up inside anything the water touches.
Around here, limescale is not a maintenance question. It is a when, not an if.
If you live anywhere in Hertfordshire, some of these will look familiar.
The chalky build up around spouts and shower screens is the visible tip. The same deposit is forming inside the fittings.
A shower that has slowly lost its punch is usually a scaled head or mixer, not a supply problem.
Scaled fill valves stop seating properly, wasting water day and night and adding to metered bills.
Washing machines, dishwashers and water heaters in hard water areas fail years sooner as elements scale up.
When a quarter turn tap starts fighting you, limescale has usually reached the cartridge.
The scale in your kettle is exactly what the inside of your hot water system looks like.
You cannot change the water, but you can change how well your plumbing copes with it. After 17 years working in this area, everything I fit and every repair I make is chosen with hard water in mind.
Most of the expensive hard water failures I see started as a cheap fix that was left. A seized tap becomes a snapped spindle. A running cistern becomes a flooded bathroom. If something in your home has started dripping, sticking or hissing, it is worth a photo and a WhatsApp before it becomes a bigger job.
Send Ben A PhotoWhether it is one stubborn tap or a bathroom the hard water has slowly claimed, I will tell you honestly what needs doing and what it will cost.