Nuvo Water Conditioner review.

10 years ago

I installed a Nuvo about 4 months ago. I live in a city with hard water (up to 250 ppm) and high pH (up to 8) although this varies, of course, with the season. Most everyone where I live has considered some sort of water softening system, and each has some drawbacks. Until the Nuvo.

You can skip the next few paragraphs if you just want an opinion and don't want to get into the chemistry of water softening. I am a chemical engineer, although I am not a water expert. The internet seems to attract people who are complete nutbars about water ("Deionized water will kill you!" No it won't, but it will taste flat as hell. "Citric acid can't soften water!" True, but you don't care.) so a bit of theory might help buyers understand a bit about what they are looking for.

The bad actors in hard water are typically thought of as the bivalent cations Mg++ and Ca++. These have poor solubility in water and precipitate as scale, as well as requiring increased detergent concentrations and so on. But the cations are only part of the story: the bivalent anion that is found in association is carbonate (CO3--). It's the combination of the Ca++, Mg++, and CO3-- that creates the calcium and magnesium carbonate scales that destroy your glassware and plumbing.

Water softening generally replaces the Ca and Mg with sodium, so you end up with sodium carbonate dissolved in the water, which has much (much!!!) higher solubility in water. Great! No more scale! But there are problems with this approach.

First of all, soft water can't be consumed. The sodium isn't good for you and tastes terrible. Secondly, you still have high pH water (carbonate is still in it), now with soda ash in it (the common name for sodium carbonate), which feels slippery and is itself a component of detergent. If you think that your soft water never feels like it's rinsing the soap off, you might be right. Finally, the ionic exchange creates waste calcium and magnesium chloride, as well as sodium carbonate--you throw water down the drain, and the sodium and chloride concentration can be hard to deal with in the waste treatment plant and environment.

Could Ca and Mg exist in water without carbonate? Anything is possible, but the source of these ions is usually carbonate salts in prairie soils... on the plains, carbon is bound up in carbonate (so if you have hard water, you probably have high pH soil and need to sulfur it in the spring). On the east coast, carbon is bound up in forests, and the soil is acidic, and the water is delicious, pH neutral, and soft.

What about deionization, such as by reverse osmosis? The water tastes flat, so I don't know about drinking it. Otherwise, I know a lot of people who have had success with it.

The Nuvo, as I understand the marketing materials, chelates the bad actor ions with citric acid. This has the dual benefit of lowering the water pH and providing an experience similar to soft water.

Okay, for those who don't care about the...

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Comments (5)

User
10 years ago
Come back and let us know how it works out. As an engineer, did you set up some sort of measurable performance test? Anecdotal evidence is often compelling to people, but can be unreliable due to the placebo effect. Were you bothered by the company's lack of supporting evidence and apparent lack of understanding of their own tech? I would be much more receptive if the unit had control methods built in, such as: A controller with user-input for hardness that would then feed the appropriate amount of citric acid based on water flow.

Just a couple of points:
- Soft water is drinkable - taste is subjective.
- Unless an individual's doctor has indicated a very low sodium diet, sodium softened water poses no health risk. Potassium softened water is fine for folks with sodium restriction.
- Not all hard water has a high pH, and higher than neutral pH is not necessarily objectionable. Many high-hardness water also suffer from low pH.
At any rate, thanks for posting your experience. I look forward to further updates.
Newalgier
Original Author
10 years ago
"Were you bothered by the company's lack of supporting evidence and apparent lack of understanding of their own tech?"

Huh? That's a "When will you stop beating your spouse," question if I ever heard one. Since the citric acid chelation doesn't change hardness as measured by conductivity or any other test, I'm not sure what they could do here. Online pH monitoring seems excessive in a consumer product. Send the water to a lab, I guess, if you're that fired up about it.

I agree that taste is subjective. Some people can't taste the difference between organic and non-organic fruit, some can, and for those who can, it's important. If the taste of your water is important, then drinking softened water might be hard for you.

What is the mechanism of low pH and hard water? I'm trying to think of how carbonic acid alone could result in hardness... certainly you can get iron, and Nuvo won't do anything about that. Do you have an analysis of low pH, hard water that I can grab off the internets? It looks to me, based on most maps such as linked below that hard water is correlated with alkaline soils.

Here is a link that might be useful: Hardness map.
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User
10 years ago
Low-pH coupled with hardness tends to occur more in the north-eastern US, where precipitation pH is low. However, there are also areas of New Mexico and Arizona with deep wells with natural mineral acids and hardness. When TDS is high, all sorts of interesting things can happen.

My question regarding the company's lack of supporting evidence was directed to your nature as a chemical engineer. There appears to be a disconnect between what a typical chemical engineer would recommend at their job and how they would justify those recommendations, and the style of your recommendation here and I was curious about that. Perhaps you obtained some information from Nuvo not readily available on their website?

I also didn't recommend controlling via pH, but via water flow rate, which is done frequently in residential acid neutralizers and is not overly difficult or expensive.

Please note that I have not said the use of citric acid to alleviate hard water problems lacks merit, just that this specific company's solution lacks control measures and this particular company appears to lack understanding of the tech. Water treatment does not easily lend itself to a one-size-fits-all solution.
pprioroh
9 years ago
Any further f/u on these. In the past I've stayed far away from the idiotic "magnetic" water softeners and other gizmos other than my reliable kinetico unit. but I saw this got an award at the national homebuilders show so that got my attention.
fixizin
9 years ago
After Mr. ChemE's eloquent, nay, glowing review, I can only wonder if Nuvo has a girly calendar... an' kin ah gets me wun wifout buyin' a Nuvo gizmo!? ;')

Nuvo Water Conditioner review.

Comments (5)

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Newalgier
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pprioroh

fixizin

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Nuvo Water Conditioner review.

Comments (5)

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NewalgierOriginal Author

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pprioroh

fixizin

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Newalgier
Original Author