Almost all the water supplied around Andover, the Test Valley and Salisbury Plain comes from chalk aquifers. It’s clean and it tastes fine, but it carries a lot of dissolved calcium, and every time it’s heated some of that comes out of solution as limescale. Anything that heats water in your house is therefore slowly filling up with chalk.
The hot water cylinder is where it matters most. Scale settles in the bottom of the cylinder and coats the immersion heater element, which then has to work harder to heat the water through a layer of insulation it’s not designed for. The element runs hot, fails early, and can trip the electrics when it goes. A cylinder that used to give a full bath and now runs out halfway through has usually lost a good part of its volume to scale.
Showers suffer the same way. Electric showers scale up on the heating element and either lose flow or cut out on overheat; mixer showers scale up in the cartridge and the head. Kettles, boiling-water taps, dishwashers and washing machines all follow the same pattern.
The fixes are straightforward and cheap compared with replacement. An inline scale reducer on the cold feed to the cylinder or shower costs very little and slows the build-up considerably. A whole-house water softener is a bigger purchase but protects everything, and in an area this hard it usually pays for itself in appliances that last. For a cylinder that’s already scaled, it’s sometimes possible to descale and refit a new immersion heater; more often, on an older cylinder, replacement makes more sense and we’ll be honest about which.
If your hot water is running out sooner than it used to, the immersion trips, or your shower has lost its flow, that’s the point to have it looked at. T2 Electrics & Plumbing fit and replace cylinders, immersion heaters, showers and scale protection across Hampshire, Wiltshire and west Berkshire, and because we cover both trades, the electrical side of an immersion heater or shower is done on the same visit.