Hydrochanger – A Game Changer

Hard water is a way of life for Northern Arizona and the mountain communities.

From Flagstaff to the Verde Valley to Show Low and points north and south, water coming from wells or municipal water systems can cause scale to accumulate and damage, with rust and oxidation, plumbing and infrastructure that is exposed to it.

Even after your city water has been treated with chlorine and for harmful chemicals and minerals such as arsenic, the calcium carbonate and other minerals that cause hard water are still there.

To combat this, for more than 100 years, salt has been used to battle the hard water by replacing minerals in the hard water with salt, thus increasing its salt content but eliminating or reducing its measureable hardness.

This has worked well, but there have been drawbacks. Drinkability suffers. Some are very sensitive to higher salt intake in their bodies. You can’t use it on your landscape or for agriculture. And then there are those constantly needed 50-pound bags of salt that must be paid for and lugged home from the store.

For a century though, this has been okay. However there is one more important drawback found in Salt Water Conditioning systems that is causing concerns. The salt bed in these systems must be reconditioned or regenerated often. This requires purging the salt bed with up to 125 gallons of water a week. This salt laden water has to go somewhere into the environment or into our recycling water treatment systems through the sewer system. This process wastes scarce valuable fresh water and is damaging river systems such as the Santa Clarita River in California, where purging into the sewer has been banned, in addition to being just plain expensive.

To address these concerns, Hydrochanger, LLC was formed in 2003 to offer an alternative to conditioning water with salt. As a long-time Flagstaff resident and part of a pioneering Arizona farm family, I, along with my business partner, Charles Roberson of Scottsdale, and with Dr. Tag Jeon, Ph.D., Biocera, Ltd., Seoul, S. Korea, (the holder of numerous ceramic media patents), designed a system to condition hard water without salt and meet some of these cost and environmental challenges.

Design and performance goals were to create a compact, self-contained, maintenance free system that utilized no chemicals, was safe inside and outside the home for humans, animals, plants and pools, that does utilize purging, and can be installed in line on plumbing.

To this end, the Hydrochanger Plus Water Conditioner was created. At about 14 inches long, two inches in diameter, weighing under five pounds, the system fights scaling, saves water, requires no chemicals, is safe on lawns, landscapes, and agriculture and reduces costs in a variety of ways.

Cost reductions result from improvements in the effectiveness of soaps, saving wear and tear on fixtures, more effectiveness in evaporative coolers and water towers, reduced need for chlorine in pools and the inherent scale build-up on tiles, in water fountains and other water features. It extends the life of membranes used in Reverse Osmosis Drinking Water Filters.

And finally, and perhaps most amazingly, it reduces the need for water used by landscapes and crops by up to 30 percent. These conditioning principles and design elements have been studied and found accurate by the renowned Ph.D. scientists at the Center for Irrigation Technology located in Fresno State University.

The system uses NSF Certified for Human Consumption, materials, that among other things, reduce oxidation due to minerals dissolved in water that make it “hard,” have a high electromotive potential and therefore interact freely with the water stream offering a ready source of needed ions, while being housed in a formed ceramic ball that is very porous and allows easier access by water molecules to the nano size material embedded in it.

In addition, the goal was the system had to be relatively inexpensive and require no additional cost to use it once installed. Finally, it needed to last at least 10 years and be warranted for that length of time. All of these design parameters were met and as a result, for those wishing an alternative to their Salt Softeners, they have been able to turn to the Hydrochanger Plus Water Conditioner, a product designed and manufactured in Arizona by an Arizona Company. QCBN

Interest and questions about the Hydrochanger Water Conditioning System may be addressed to Dan Simione, 602-942-8422