John Laforme and Ron King discuss the effects of hard water on homeowners, They emphasize the need for proper evaluation and recommendations for water treatment systems, highlighting the importance of testing water quality and evaluating plumbing system tolerance. Ron also discuss's water quality standards and regulations set by the EPA and local water providers, arguing that these standards should balance consumer preferences with what providers can deliver.
Homeowners can check their local water quality report or request a water test from Culligan to determine hardness levels.
John will refer homeowners with hard water questions to contact Ron for an evaluation of their home and recommendation of an appropriate treatment system.
Ron King explains his experience and expertise in the water filtration industry.
Customers in Southern California experience hard water, leading to hair and skin issues.
Contact Ron King For water testing and filtration installation: Office 818-271-1106 email rking@hallswater.com
Listener Feedback Is Always Welcome and Appreciated. Is there a particular topic I have not covered on the show that you want to hear?
You can become a supporter of the show by clicking this link below, become a supporter and get a shout out on the next podcast episode. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1838062/support
Please feel free to email me what type of topics you are interested in as well as any other tips to improve your listening experience. john@homeinspectionauthority.com
🟢 If you are in the Los Angeles area and are in the process of buying a home I am available to inspect it for you. You can Schedule Inspection Online 24/7 https://www.h...
John Laforme and Ron King discuss the effects of hard water on homeowners, They emphasize the need for proper evaluation and recommendations for water treatment systems, highlighting the importance of testing water quality and evaluating plumbing system tolerance. Ron also discuss's water quality standards and regulations set by the EPA and local water providers, arguing that these standards should balance consumer preferences with what providers can deliver.
Homeowners can check their local water quality report or request a water test from Culligan to determine hardness levels.
John will refer homeowners with hard water questions to contact Ron for an evaluation of their home and recommendation of an appropriate treatment system.
Ron King explains his experience and expertise in the water filtration industry.
Customers in Southern California experience hard water, leading to hair and skin issues.
Contact Ron King For water testing and filtration installation: Office 818-271-1106 email rking@hallswater.com
Listener Feedback Is Always Welcome and Appreciated. Is there a particular topic I have not covered on the show that you want to hear?
You can become a supporter of the show by clicking this link below, become a supporter and get a shout out on the next podcast episode. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1838062/support
Please feel free to email me what type of topics you are interested in as well as any other tips to improve your listening experience. john@homeinspectionauthority.com
🟢 If you are in the Los Angeles area and are in the process of buying a home I am available to inspect it for you. You can Schedule Inspection Online 24/7 https://www.h...
John Laforme:
Buying a home. Don't panic. Just listen to the rest of this podcast. Hey, everybody, I'm back. And I have a great guest today. I have Ron King, aka the Culligan. Man, the water specialist. And the first thing I got to say to you, Ron, before you start talking is one of my favorite movies is The Waterboy. Okay, you know how good that movie was that there is some quality h2o.
Ron King:
I hope I'm as good as he. So
John Laforme:
Ron, tell everybody who you are and what it is you do and how long you've been doing it. Okay,
Ron King:
my name is Ron King, And I am a water specialists and contractor with Culligan water of Sylmar, California, right. So I am not only a water specialist, but I am in the business of determining the needs and placement of water filtration systems in homes and businesses. of any type of pretty much any size.
John Laforme:
Right on so as you know, I'm a home inspector. But I do have questions regarding, you know, water in homes, because I get I get questions asked all the time from my customers. Sometimes they'll ask me stuff and I got to scratching my head, then I was a good question. So I need to someday I'm going to meet somebody in the water filtration business. And then I ran into you at the Pasadena Home Show. I went out there with my wife to just look, see what was going on. I was kind of disappointed at the show, honestly, because it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I just seem like I was being forced fed information from contractors, every time I took two steps, I didn't realize it was going to be that I thought it was going to be something different. But I wanted to get out there and just see what was going on. Because I'm always remodeling my house. I'm always doing something here. And I wanted to go to check out some of the contractors to see what they had for, you know, cabinets and so forth. And then I met you there. And we spoke briefly and I said, Wow. I'd like to talk to you some more. So that's why I invited you on the show. Your I believe when I when I saw your card, it said that you are water specialist on like, oh, well, that's, that is absolutely perfect. So as far as customer questions, you know, the number one is what is hard water? Now, I could give them my explanation of that. But I'd rather hear it from you. Okay,
Ron King:
go right ahead. Hard water. Okay. Being in California, and specifically, Southern California. In this area, people experience hard water across the board, everyone. I find that when I meet customers, and I go to the homes, and it appears that customers who come from other areas, they recognize the hard water in California immediately, though they don't know exactly what it is, and what's causing I know something's wrong, but they know something's wrong based on the fact that they came from the Midwest, they're from New York City area, whatever. And the biggest concern is either first of all, why is my hair so crazy. I mean, mostly it's a women that complain, I'm doing my hair and just like I can't manage my own hair, my hair is breaking off in the sink and in the shower. And then my skin is very dry. So that's the first complaint that people have when they encounter hard water, particularly for the first time. And those people who already know what hard water is and they've experienced it. So it's just a question of whether or not they want to deal with it. Right or not, but the people who experienced it the first time they're pretty they're in a in a quandary as to what this is and why why is it causing this? So coming from cupping California our water is is a lot of is aquifer water. So it's coming from an underground it's running over limestone, sandstone, whatever. And by water running over any type of stone, water picks up a little bit of whatever it touches. So if you look at the Grand Canyon, the indication that they give us scientifically is that canyon wasn't always there. But over centuries and millennia of time the water eroded that big cube hole in the Colorado River, right and erode the ground. Right. So imagine any water that's coming into your shower at some twin time has run across a tremendous amount of rock, ice and the water department of the city is not in the business of taking that hardness out there in the business of making sure that your water meets the A, the EPA Standard for basically portability of
John Laforme:
water, which is probably the minimum, right,
Ron King:
you know, and with all due respect, the EPA will set a standard level that is reasonably attainable by the city, it would be pointless for the EPA to set a standard for purity or cleanliness, or contamination levels of water that they know that city can't meet, right? Because that would immediately mean the shutting down of that water facility. And people wouldn't have any water. Right, they'd have to buy all their drinking water, and then they'd have to buy gallons of water and pour it over themselves to take
John Laforme:
a shower. So their main purpose is to provide water to purify water not to super purify it exactly.
Ron King:
And to meet somewhere in the middle between what you want in your water as a consumer, and what is possible for the provider that wanted to be able to provide with a standard in the middle. Right. Okay. And I always it kind of shocks people, but I want to share it with your your listeners is that, you know, when you talk in terms of the FDA Food and Drug Administration, whatever, if there's a company that makes rice, okay, they will inspect that company. And based on their standard, they will say we will allow you so many parts per million of mouse hairs in the rice. Right? We will allow them so we inspect your facility, as long as when we do our inspection and do our count on what we see that the number of mouse hairs per parts per million doesn't exceed doesn't exceed this number. You're good. Now you and I both know, how many parts per million of rat hairs do we really want in our rice? Zero. But they know that zero rat hairs
John Laforme:
is not possible. It's not possible. There are too many
Ron King:
rats in there and they they govern where they go. We don't right, they determine that on their own. We can only minimize how many and where they go. So the same thing with the water they can the city has to decide, okay, what what are we going to focus on? And is hardness in the water detrimental to your health? No. Okay, it is not, not to your health. It may be detrimental to how you feel and your aesthetics and how your hair looks and whether your skin is dry. But dry skin never killed anybody.
John Laforme:
Not that I know of, you know, a terrible hair. Wait a minute, let me call my wife she might complain about bad hair day.
Ron King:
You know make you not look feel comfortable when you look in the mirror. But other people may not notice it. But you know what you how you want your
John Laforme:
hair, it's what hats and for us what hats are for you have a bad hair day you put a hat on. So taking
Ron King:
the hardness out of the water is not their concern. So very well said when we move into a home if you and I lived in the woods, we had a tree house and we were drinking water from the stream. And we were showering from the waterfall. You know and all of our foods you know we were cooking from a little pot and making a little charcoal whatever of fire to living off the land, we would not have a problem with hard water. Because hard water is only a challenge when you run that hot water hard water into a system where it has to come in contact with metal. So it's the metal in the house that doesn't like hard water. Cut the calcification as well as when you take that hard water and you mix it with soap. The white sludge that you see on your shower doors and crusting on your showerheads and your faucets can't stand it. That's the hardness in the water. When you put soap in it the soap when it goes into the hard water. It's first responsibility is not to clean your hair. It's first responsibility is to clean the water. That's why it immediately binds with that hardness creates this white sludge. So now that whites sludge with whatever is leftover soap is now trying to clean your hair. And then when you rinse your hair, you're trying to rinse that sludge out with more hard water can't do it. So the hair and the laundry and your clothes, really don't get clean.
John Laforme:
Ladies, are you listening to this? This is a lot of good information right here, because
Ron King:
you can't rinse out, you can't rinse out something with something that has the same thing in it right hardness, so the hardness is still there. So don't address it. So that so rather than going any further than that, what is hardness? That is what hardness is in the water is calcium, magnesium, how hard your water is, which we'll probably get into that later. Right? It varies. And that's that's determined based on a acronym, which is grains per gallon. How many grains per gallon of hardness is in the water. That means how much hardness of calcium and magnesium is in each gallon of water in you as it flows through your home.
John Laforme:
That's something you have to determine when you come to a house or a business. And then water test. And then from there you did you determine or recommend what system is best for that house,
Ron King:
we determine what system is is best for the house. But it's not based on the hardness, okay, at least in this area and another area where hardness may not be an issue, then that may be an option to go with another piece of equipment. But generally speaking, right? Hardness is going to be dealt with with a softener. The difference in hardness only dictates how often that system has to regenerate. Now you want me to go clean that for you. Sure. Okay, regeneration, I'm all ears. Regeneration is the process, you want to look at it like a vacuum cleaner bag. If you have vacuum in your home, you have a bag on the collects dirt. And once that black vacuum bag is full, you have to change that bag, right. Otherwise, if you don't change the bag, what happens is while the vacuum cleaner is blowing, if the bag is full, it will start blowing dirt back out into the room. Okay, which is the same thing that happens with the software. Once it gets to the point where it's met its capacity of what it can accumulate in calcium and magnesium on the resin beads inside the tank, the system now goes into regeneration. That means the system now will go into automatically into bypass it'll shut off the water to itself and allow the water to only flow from the water main through the house bypassing the unit got it which is what's called a bypass unit. Now during that time period, the system now has pump water into the brine tank or the sodium pellets and it will create a brine water and it will now suck that brine water through the resin beads in the tank while the regular water is flowing through the house regular hard water and as it's doing that the sodium water which has a greater let's call it affinity to attract the calcium magnesium that has attached themselves to the resin because the resin attracts them out of the water and allows the water to flow through the system soft B can soft means it has taken off the majority of the hardness not all of it. But it's gotten that hardness level and the water from let's say nine grains per gallon down to one. Okay, now it's soft because all of the hardness most of it has attached itself to the resin inside of the tank. Now in order to get that sodium to release itself from the resin in the tank and clean itself, you have to put something in there that has a greater affinity to attract their calcium magnesium to where they'll jump off the resin on to that which is sodium sweet attaches itself to the sodium ions and then they flushed down the drain in the system and rinses itself. So you're saying
John Laforme:
you're referring to salt, right? Yeah. So like it's a so part of your system is a salt system right? Okay.
Ron King:
So now once it flushes it down the drain fluffs itself, it's ready goes back in service again. Now the water is flowing through and it's ready to begin like a brand new cleanup walk dragging in a bag is ready to start all over again. Collecting
John Laforme:
that's really interesting technology right there because it literally has a bypass. It shuts itself down reworks itself while allows the water to flow throughout the house without interruption. Right. That's, that's really interesting. And so
Ron King:
the system because because it does that region, it like you said doesn't interrupt the water flow, but it does get itself ready to start working all over again. Now,
John Laforme:
now how long is that, that that that time period region,
Ron King:
on a smaller system, it's about an hour, hour and 15 minutes, some of the largest systems may take an hour and a half depending on the size of the equipment. But that is the process of how the system actually works to be able to clean saw. And
John Laforme:
so I'm hanging on you say this, before I forget this. So what you're describing is if that system takes an hour or an hour and a half to clean itself out. So for an hour, an hour and a half you're not getting, you're not getting the benefits of hard water treatment, because of that's going on Correct.
Ron King:
Exactly, exactly for that time period. And most times, this our systems, they default, our region time, they default at 2am.
John Laforme:
I say when no one's really using anything, but you can
Ron King:
tell the technician, I would prefer to have it to region at this time, based on my work schedule based on my my dynamic. My family works, I would like a region time but this time, and they will set it for that time. That's interesting, maybe it can be set for another time. And and and that's how it works. Now when it comes to regenerate, regenerating the hardness of the water, you remember I said the site the equipment is not is the equipment itself is not changed based on the hardness of the water. Right? So if your hardness of your water is nine grains per gallon, in my in my area where I live, I'm at 15 grains per gallon. That means my system is going to collect this and let's say again, they said this, that the size of our houses are about the same. Which meaning not necessarily only that are the square footage of the house. But it's the number of fixtures in the house sure to utilize water and mainly the number of full bathrooms. So when I go to home, I suppose well, how many bathrooms Do you have? And they'll normally say, Well, we have four bathrooms. So does that mean three full and one powder? They go? You're exactly right. Exactly. So the powder out discounts discard that one. Because there's no shower bathtub. We're only talking about a lavvy. A toilet and a sink. Yeah, yeah. So three bathrooms, those diminish. So we look at how many showers are can run. If you're at nine and I made 15 or 16 grains, your system may region every 28 days. Whereas based on my hardness, my system may region every 14 days.
John Laforme:
Oh, you know, I wasn't even catching that at first, when glad you you made put more detail on that because I wasn't even thinking of that until you just said that. So I wasn't thinking wow, it could take 30 days for that thing to go through its region cycle. It's not like a daily thing. No, I say because
Ron King:
it's got to come. It's like it's like a vacuum cleaner. How many days? Does it take for this vacuum cleaner bag to fill up with dirt? With me vacuuming my carpet. Right? To where I need to change the bag. Got me. Okay. Okay. So that may take the that may take a couple weeks, two weeks. Now, my son comes home one day, wants to have a party right after they won to the rugby tournament. And he brings 20 guys to my house right after the rugby game. And they now pile into my living room just right after a rugby game.
John Laforme:
And he forgot the vacuum, didn't he?
Ron King:
So now when I vacuum the floor after these guys leave, I've now filled up my vacuum cleaner bag. Gotcha. In three days,
John Laforme:
so the more usage dictates when you're or the more agenda
Ron King:
or let's put it like this. Let's make it clear for your audience. The dirty or the water. Right? The more often it's going to take them to read more frequent. It's going to be for the system to reach in or harder the water the more frequent the region process. Got
John Laforme:
it. Understood. I got no, that's good. Thank you. Good stuff. We're off to a good start there, Ronnie. Good, good, good explanation, by the way, too. I was able to follow along that means a lot. All right, so I was gonna ask another question. You may have covered this, but I'll say it anyway. How does a homeowner determine if they have hard
Ron King:
water? Okay. First of all, you determine that you've got hard water by way you live. Okay, the
John Laforme:
way we would a homeowner go to find that out before that, let's say we're thinking about buying a house, like woodland hills or, or maybe, you know, Burbank or or West LA, where would they go to find out if that area is known to have a high hard water, okay on situation, every area
Ron King:
publishes online their annual water report. Okay, so any consumer can go online to the water department, you can go to LA water, if you live in Beverly Hills, you can go to Beverly Hills, you know, and you can see whether your area outside of an entire county has a specific water report that they do. But you can go into the online and find out the closest and most applicable water report for your area. Okay, and it's published online, available for you download it, and you can they'll put on there exactly what the hardness level is, is
John Laforme:
that a monthly thing or a yearly, yearly, yearly annual, okay.
Ron King:
And they would publish what not only what everything about the water, what's in the water, and what levels whether they meet the APA is in no MCL, which is maximum contamination contamination levels of the water, they publish in there show you exactly what the EPA says, This is the most you can have of this particular chemical. And this is what our level is, you know, so they list all of that for you every single year. You know, so okay, it's on there is what your hardness level is for your area. And, but after that, you can call a company like Kalyan, and we do water tests, and we will come out and immediately test and tell you what your hardness level is at your house. And in your neighborhood. But specifically for you since the request is by you got
John Laforme:
it, okay. And the the simplest indicator that you have hard water in your house is the filament leaves behind on your faucets and you're on your glass and all that stuff. Depending
Ron King:
on how hard the water is, again, the harder the water is, the quicker you're going to see that a lot of people will see the the place that will cause the water to to show it to the hard water to show itself the fastest, or the quickest, are areas in your house that deal with hot water. Okay, because hardness of calcium and magnesium participates out of water faster on the cold side than the hot side. I see. Okay, so the hot water heater in your house will scale quickly because it's heating that water. Yeah. So it's going to scale that hot heating element. And you're going to see it there. In your shower, you will see it through your shower doors and on the fastest because you're mixing hot water and cold water, you know together so you're going to see it on your showered and soap. Yes, and you're mixing it with the soap. So you're going to see when you see the calcification coming out of your showerheads. And you see that whiteness, that's mostly because of the hardness in the water and the hot water. Got it. Because you're not throwing soap up there. You know, when you see it on your shower doors that hard Scotland, it's hard to rub it off. That's the hardness in the water mixing with mixing with the soap. You know, so that's, that's how they went. That's how they know they will see by what they experienced on their skin, hair fixtures, whatever, but they can find out by either first of all pulling a water report and then having an actual, you know, test run by us after we come out to the
John Laforme:
house. Okay, everybody. So if you're paying attention, I have to
Ron King:
say there are some people to say you know what? Well, the water, we really haven't felt the hard water has been a problem for us. And my answer to that is if you can tolerate the hard water, physically your body to where it's not a big deal for you. The question is, can your house tolerate it?
John Laforme:
Referring to the plumbing? Yes.
Ron King:
Because copper pipe in my house, same copper pipe that's in your house. Just a question of the gauge, type
John Laforme:
M or type L There you go.
Ron King:
Okay,
John Laforme:
I look at that stuff every day.
Ron King:
That's the only thing that changes. Yeah. Okay. And if you will, some people might say well, you know, we don't have copper, we use PVC, or wii u xx. Okay, that's fine. So you don't have that concern on there. But when it comes out of the faucets, you have people who are trying who spent a lot Have money on water fixtures and their house
John Laforme:
aerators get clogged up all the time, and they're trying to clean
Ron King:
them. And I said you ever tried to clean? Take a while and try to clean that faucet? The scaling on it. And when you try to clean it off, the coating on the fixture comes off. Oh,
John Laforme:
yeah. That's like fuse together. And they say yes, that
Ron King:
happened. I said, Yeah. Because it's like rock. If you leave it there, it fuses to there and when you pull it off, the first thing it's going to get lift off is going to be whatever finish they put on that metal that's underneath. It's going to take it off hot metal,
John Laforme:
that cheap hot metal. Most faucets are so cheap. Yeah, you got to spend really good money to get a really solid faucet.
Ron King:
It could no totally cost a lot of money to get a really good faucet. Yeah, but yeah, it
John Laforme:
definitely definitely makes a lot of sense. If you think you have hard water what you most likely do it to some level. You want to give her on a call, have him come valuate your house and maybe he can recommend a system for you