Water quality and the preservation of water resources are among the top reasons that designers become environmentalists. Professionals design to reduce, recycle and reuse water. They know that drinking water is a nonrenewable resource and water use impacts many aspects of building design, including energy consumption. Most designers already know that they can reduce water by using low-flow fixtures. Some are experimenting with gray water reuse and recycling within a building as well as for irrigation. A select few are beginning to understand the impact of source water, with its increasingly complex mix of minerals, contaminants and pollutants, on building systems.

Buildings are part of a natural hydrologic cycle. The flow of water through the built environment can greatly influence water quality and harm plumbing and heating systems. Designing for zero waste, zero energy, gold, platinum, zirconium rating systems and beyond, architects and engineers have focused a lot of attention on using nature as a guide for environmental design. What if nature needs nurturing?

Water contains common elements, among which are ions of calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium. The problem with water is that high concentrations of calcium and magnesium contained in the water can cause scale to form on pipes and water heating equipment. Scale increases maintenance and causes premature mechanical failures resulting in as much as a 24 percent loss in energy efficiency in water heaters.¹ A common early method of water conditioning used ion exchange or softening as a means to control scale. However, these systems execute regeneration cycles that discharge water and brine as waste, causing an environmental problem for natural water systems. In parts of California, Michigan and other states, policy regulations that protect the water supply include the ban of water softeners that use salt to regenerate. These policies mean that new forms of water treatment needed to be more environmentally sensitive, friendlier to the environment and free of chemicals, salt and waste discharge.

Photo courtesy of Watts

Physical water treatment systems (PWT) are alternative or unconventional ways to treat water in order to prevent the damage caused by hard water scale. The advantages of these technologies are that they help the environment. They do not include a salt regeneration or discharge into the wastewater systems. PWT technologies are based on a variety of ways to transform water molecules through magnetic, electrostatic, capacitive, catalytic, or by transforming hardness into a non-scale forming microscopic crystal through media-assisted crystallization. Among the physical water treatment systems, media-assisted crystallization (MAC) excels in scale prevention and meets even the most stringent environmental standards.