Scale Inhibitors & Water Treatment | Aquabion, Adey & Kamco
A collection page of AIZO Quality Heating
About
Limescale is one of the most damaging and least visible problems in UK heating and hot water systems. In hard water areas — which cover the majority of England, particularly the South East, East Anglia, and the Midlands — dissolved calcium and magnesium minerals precipitate out of the water as it heats up, forming hard, chalky deposits inside pipework, boilers, heat exchangers, cylinders, and appliances. Even a thin layer of scale acts as an effective thermal insulator, forcing your boiler to work harder, consume more energy, and wear out faster. Left untreated, scale buildup is a leading cause of boiler inefficiency, immersion heater failure, and reduced system lifespan. Scale inhibitors prevent this from happening — either by altering the physical structure of minerals so they can't bond to surfaces, or by introducing chemical agents that keep minerals in suspension and allow them to be flushed safely through the system. Do You Live in a Hard Water Area? Before investing in scale protection it's worth confirming your water hardness. As a rough guide, water hardness above 200mg/l (or 200 ppm) is generally considered hard enough to warrant active scale protection, and anything above 300mg/l is classified as very hard. Your local water supplier is required to publish hardness data, and many areas in southern and eastern England sit well above these thresholds. In soft water areas — much of Scotland, Wales, and northern England — scale is less of a concern, though corrosion inhibition remains important. Aquabion — Chemical-Free Electrolytic Scale Protection Aquabion takes a fundamentally different approach to scale prevention. Rather than using chemicals, the Aquabion device uses a sacrificial zinc alloy anode to trigger an electrolytic reaction in the water passing through it. This reaction alters the crystalline structure of the calcium carbonate, changing it from the hard, adhesive aragonite form into the soft, non-adhesive calcite form. The result is that limescal