Does anyone have a water softener attached to their mains water???

[Lauriefairycake]

Does it make a difference? Do they really work ?? the limescale here is so bad it keeps 'blowing' the seals on the shower heads and huge lumps of scale keep coming out.

Any ideas of costs??

can't telll you about cost as not in UK, but we have one and it's great, water still not 'soft' but without it we'd have bricks dropping out of our taps.We ran out of salt for it once and I really noticed the difference. I'd really recommend it.

We're in the Midlands and we have one. It doesn't rid us of limescale comepletely, but it's really reduced and definitely worth having. I don't remember how much it cost, but am pretty sure it was in the tens, rather than hundreds of pounds.

About £300, IIRC. Cuts down on teh amunt of shampoo, washing powder, etc., you use too. We had a new boiler & shower put in, so seemed daft not to take care of them from teh outset..

We spent £1300 on ours last year, but it was a top of the range Kinetico. You can get lots cheaper and also reconditioned ones. We also spend about £100 a year on the salt. We don't get limescale any more, and we too use less washing powder etc. For us the biggest plus was that it improved ds's eczema really dramatically within 2 days and we haven't looked back.

to give you an idea of day to day results, in the 3 years we've had it we've not had to descale the shower head once, but have done the kettle, maybe 1 or 2 a year

we have something like this - not that one precisely but can't remember the name of the one we have.

Cost about £50 I think - and it really does seem to soften the water - the dishwasher (very clever one !) certainly thinks it reduced the hardness to very very soft .

we have one think it needs changing (midlands) it worked to start with everytime the kettle (from once every month to once every 12weeks) started to scale up the water would descale it partially hth (didnt pay so no info on cost)