Why do I Need to Bother with Water Softening?
By Kelli Barrett
Limescale is more than an annoyance, it can destroy equipment and your profitability.
If anything else in the catering world damaged your equipment and reduced production so dramatically, it would be a massive deal, but limescale still doesn’t seem to have the recognition it deserves.
How serious is it?
Very! 70 percent of machine breakdowns are related to limescale*. I’m going to give that fact its own line so you can appreciate it:
70 percent of ALL equipment breakdowns are related to limescale.
So we think it’s a vital problem to understand and know how to solve. See below for the lowdown and how to choose the right water softening option:
What IS limescale?
Lots of catering equipment uses huge amounts of water each and every day. U-Select’s most popular items include dishwashers, pasta cookers and combi-ovens, which all connect to the mains and that means thinking about hard water before you install, can save you heartache and money later on.
Hard water carries minerals in it, picked up as it passes through limestone and chalk on its journey through the water table.
These deposits can build up where the water is heated or simply flows regularly — which means it can leave deposits in any of your equipment.
These deposits can seriously damage your equipment, sometimes in a very short period of time. The limescale buildup can block pipes and stops water from lathering properly, inhibiting the cleaning power of detergents — absolutely vital to any catering business.
More than this, a piece of equipment with limescale build up is much less efficient.
So limescale can slowly make your equipment less and less effective, and more and more expensive, until it finally breaks, costing you money in repairs AND lost production.
How do you solve it?
To prevent this potentially expensive build up you need to treat your water before it goes into your equipment. Treatment means removing harmful minerals and is called ‘water softening’.
What you need to do to protect against build it depends on whether the equipment you are using is used in food production or not.
Used in food production? You need a CTU
A Calcium Treatment Unit, or CTU, is what you need to add to any piece of equipment that uses water which comes into contact with food or drink (such as combination ovens, coffee machines).
A CTU uses a bed of resin beads which collects the minerals found in hard water. Each CTU can process a set volume of hard water before the buildup of minerals within it stops it working, which means it will need to be replaced.
Each unit is normally installed with a flow meter so that it is easy to check when the unit needs replacing. The life of a CTU depends on its size and the amount you are using it, but it is easy to get in replacements.
Using a dishwasher, glasswasher or washing machine? You need a Water Softening Unit or Reverse Osmosis
A water softener works using a similar system to the CTU, except it uses a salty ‘brine’ to give the bed of resin beads a wash automatically.
This means the water softener is often easier to care for (you just need to top up the salt regularly, depending on how much you use the equipment it is attached to) and requires less maintenance — but because it uses salt to clean the resin beads it cannot be used with items connected with food production.
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Reverse Osmosis is the A-grade of filtering for water — passing the liquid through a membrane which stops more than 98 per cent of the impurities within it, some dishwashers and glasswashers come with this kind of system installed, and protect your glassware and crockery from marking and deposits.
What system is right for you?
It’s vital to check what water softening is included in the equipment you get for your catering business — dishwashers can have internal systems, but if can be more economic to have a separate external system that will be a bigger upfront cost, but will require less maintenance day to day, especially if you are a business with a lot of washing up!
Many cookers have CTUs but you need to factor in the need for replacing them, and again, sometimes you may need an external system in addition instead.
Check with your suppliers and don’t leave it up to chance — limescale deposits cause huge problems across the catering industry and are really simple to fix!
*Source: Brita
Kelli Barrett — U-Select Sales Executive
Kelli is the latest member of the U-Select team and prides herself on helping our customers get the best service. Kelli loves learning and is quickly becoming an expert on all aspects of catering equipment and its features.
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Originally published at u-select.co.uk on June 17, 2016.
