The easiest way to cut down on your spring cleaning time? Prevent those tough cleaning problems from building up throughout the year! The kind of water you use in your home can be a friend or foe when it comes to chores. Having a home softener will help you breeze through kitchen cleanup and can even get your laundry looking better. The secret to cleaning isn’t in your cleaning products—it’s in your water! Our regular tap water is hard, meaning it’s got high levels of dissolved minerals in it. These hard water minerals are found naturally in our source water, but they’re pretty annoying to have in our home’s tap water. The minerals lowers the effectiveness of bar soap and some other cleaning solutions. Which means tougher work year-round for home cleaning and upkeep. A water softener works to remove those tough minerals in tap water. The result is soft water. And because soft water doesn’t have those hard minerals in it, it’s a lot better for cleaning. If you’re constantly dealing with any of these cleaning problems around your home, it’s probably time to switch to soft water.

Hard Water in the Kitchen

The Problem: Of anywhere else in your home, probably the most obvious sign of hard water is having a foggy haze on your clean glasses. When the water evaporates from the dishes, it leaves behind a layer of those dissolved hard water minerals. The minerals also build up in your dishwasher. Cleaning Solution: You can try to use certain dishwasher cleaners or rinse aids to try to keep your dishes sparkly. But odds are, you’ll have to clean the hard water deposits with vinegar. And don’t forget to clean the dishwasher itself! You’ll need to remove any mineral buildup in the spinning arm, scrub the whole inside, and run a cycle with vinegar to help get the machine in better working order. Of course, you won’t ever really be rid of the hard water problems if you don’t tackle the hard water problem at its source.

Hard Water in the Bathroom

The Problem: Hard water also takes its toll in your bathroom. The hard water spots on your glass shower have to be scrubbed away, and your faucets and showerheads get covered with a hard, rock-like mineral scale. Cleaning Solution: Again, vinegar can sometimes do the trick. If you want to do a daily prevention of water spots for your shower, try filling a clean spray bottle with a three-part water and one-part white vinegar solution. The idea is that if you spray your shower and other problem areas with the mixture daily, the spots will be stop forming. Your better option? A water softener. Using soft water instead of hard water will keep the hard scale from building up on your faucets too. That way, you can bypass the vinegar mixes and vinegar-soaked rags for cleaning sinks and other water fixtures. The water softener will prevent all that cleaning work for you.

Hard Water in the Laundry Room

The Problem: It’s not always as easy to see the effects of hard water in the laundry room—but trust us, the problems are there. Hard water can make your clothes’ fabrics feel kind of stiff. It definitely doesn’t help your towels get nice and fluffy. Using hard water with laundry also requires you to use more detergent to get a good clean load of clothes. Cleaning Solution: Soft water! Once you’ve got a water softener, you’ll actually need to cut back on the amount of detergent you use. Without having dissolved minerals in it, your water can do a much better job at cleaning and rinsing for you. Look closely, and you’ll probably even start to see that your whites are brighter with soft water laundry. And because soft water works so well with detergents, you might even be able to wash all your clothes on cold cycles. The water won’t need the higher temperatures like it did with hard water to wash away the mineral deposits and soapy residue in your laundry. Why bother with harsh scale-removing chemical solutions when you can prevent hard water cleaning projects from forming in the first place? A home water softener is great for simplifying the cleaning process. Soft water helps your soap, detergents, and cleaning solutions do their best work for you year-round. So when spring comes along, you can get the other cleaning jobs done quicker and easier.