How do I stop my shower scaling up?

Hannah Gapper

White coat chemist Guru, fresh from his subterranean lab that definitely does not contain unholy half-human half-machine hybrids, has a little science lesson for you. Limescale is calcium carbonate, left behind in deposits when hard water evaporates, and it’s heavily alkaline, meaning (as your mum has probably told you ad nauseum) you can dissolve it with mildly acidic substances like vinegar or lemon juice. For surfaces it won’t run off, spray some on, wait a bit, then scrub the residue away. For things like showerheads and taps, try rubber-banding a bag full of dilute acid mix and leaving it on the affected fitting for a while. Just be careful around brass hardware.

That’s practical, but impractical too. Fixing a problem that’s already happened is one thing, but cutting it off at the source means you’ll have less ongoing maintenance to deal with. Depending on your fluency with a blowtorch and a greasy rag, the following is probably an ask-your-plumber task, but GaGu would recommend looking into whole-home water softeners, which use resin beads to suck out the calcium and magnesium ions in your water, switching them for sodium. The beads do need occasional periods of regeneration, and special salt (much like your dishwasher demands) to do it, but if you opt for a larger and pricier twin-tank solution there’ll be no break in your soft water.

If you’re really only bothered about your shower, you could buy an incredibly ugly water softener showerhead, which is likely far worse than the one you have, or an in-line softener, which may or may not do a half-decent job. AquaHomeGroup’s 15-stage filter should be around $159, comes in a bunch of fixin’-matching finishes, and you can install it yourself..