Commercial Properties and Water Treatment Systems
If you own a retail business or some other kind of commercial business here in Southwest Florida that doesn’t necessarily have customers who drink your water, you may think you don’t need a water treatment system. It may seem like it makes sense, after all, you don’t have customers who might complain about the taste of the water. But water treatment is about so much more than that, and the other benefits of it are often overlooked.
In fact, the main reason to look into a water treatment system for your commercial property is to prevent leaks and wear and tear on your pipes.
Here in SWFL, all tap water is “hard,” whether it’s well water or city water. Hard water has a high mineral content, mainly calcium and magnesium. Hard water is not bad for you, but it is bad for your pipes.
Hard water can cause devastating effects on plumbing, hot water heaters, and all of the pipes in your building. Hard water reduces the life span of your plumbing systems and contributes to problems such as rusting, reduced effectiveness of cleaning agents, and scale buildup in your pipes. Stemming from the buildup, lime “scale” accumulation can result in your water heater and plumbing systems using more energy, in turn costing you more money in the long run. Scale can clog pipes, decreasing the life of flushing units by 70% and water taps by 40%
We recently saw the effects of hard water on pipes in a large “big box store” here in Fort Myers. We worked on the store just two years ago, replacing many of the pipes and plumbing systems. Pipes should last way longer than two years. However, this store recently had an issue where the water had been turned off in a section of the store by an air conditioning repair company. When they turned it back on, the high pressure of the water rushing back through the pipes caused several of them to “burst” with holes in them, causing leaks in a number of places because they were already too corroded from the hard water here. Now, these were not low-quality pipes, but the store had no water treatment, so the hard city water took it’s toll on them, causing an emergency that had us out at the store at 3 a.m. to try to get all the leaks repaired and new piping put in before the store had to open in the morning. It cost that store a pretty penny in replacing pipes and in having to have us do emergency repairs in the middle of the night. What’s more. . . it could have been prevented by having storewide water treatment.
At West Coast Plumbing and Water Treatment, we’ve patented our own water treatment options that are designed especially for the hard water we have here in Southwest Florida. If you have a commercial building here, call us at 239-340-8224 for a consultation on putting in a water treatment system for your building, and save on costly emergency pipe repairs.