What is a water conditioner?
The term water conditioner (sometimes called physical water conditioner or physical water treatment device) is generally used to describe a wide range of products that are designed to prevent lime-scale build-up on heat-exchange surfaces when hard water is heated. Unlike softeners or filters which work by removing the ions (hardness salts) which form the lime-scale, water conditioners generally work by affecting the chemistry of the precipitation reaction: suppressing lime-scale formation, reducing the rate of scaling, or by altering the form of the scale or the chemistry of the precipitation mechanism itself. There are lots of different types of products on the market with a variety of claimed operating mechanisms. The most common types of water conditioner include: • Magnetic – Claimed to prevent scale-build-up by influencing the type of lime-scale crystals precipitated – causing more needle-like aragonite crystals to be formed, which find it harder to stick to heat-exchange surfaces
