Many of the building sites that we design plumbing and/or hydronic heating systems for have hard water. In an effort to be as “Green” as possible, we have stopped specifying traditional water softeners. App-tech now tailors the water treatment to the specific needs of each job. Our goal was to find a substitute for traditional water softeners that did not add chemicals such as sodium or potassium to the water and did not consume excessive amounts of water with back flushing cycles. We have spent a lot of effort checking out the fantastic claims of many of these products.

We have found only one test protocol that we believe accurately verifies the scale prevention properties of these systems. That test procedure is the DVGW (Deutscher Verein des Gas und Wasserfaches) Standard W 512. We will try to specify only products that have passed this test by an independent third party laboratory or that demonstrate similar performance. There is not currently any US standard test that is equivalent to this German test, but IAPMO is working on developing one. It will probably be another year or more before the IAPMO committee reaches consensus on a procedure.