Eczema and Psoriasis

I have talked before about this problem and despite Nottingham University running tests on salt softeners, we never heard the results did we?

Well I am very curious to know just how effective our LP units are in the treatment of eczema and psoriasis and dry skin problems generally. Over the years we have had some spectacular successes with our electronic conditioners and given that there is no risk in trying one out (since we give a 12 month NO QUIBBLE money back guarantee) I would have thought that anyone who suffers from these conditions would have had a go.

Call me or oder on line at http://www.littleplumber.com/ and have an itch free Christmas

Nothing to lose, Everything to gain

WATER SOFTENERS

We all know when we've got hard water and limescale. It's in the kettle and shower heads and turns the end of the taps white. What we need is a water softener. Or is it? Have you ever considered that the cost of a softener can be hundreds of pounds and then you just have to keep adding salt. The saline solution from the regeneration process drains away so all in all not very environmentally friendly.
The electronic water conditioner is altogether a better and cheaper proposition to a water softener. It costs you less than it saves you in the first year and required no salt or maintenance.
Yes the Little Plumber range is 10 years old. Offering a full 12 month money back guarantee why not try one before you rush out and buy tons of salt???

SAVE ENERGY, MONEY AND THE WORLD

When you see all the huff that is printed about saving the environment you'd think nothing else mattered. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps if we do turn off the lights, lag our lofts, shower with a friend we WILL use less energy. Keep the foot off the gas pedal, eat less, drink less, consume less but it's all an effort. Meanwhile I want to read my book with lights that come on instantly, not take for ever to warm up. I want a hot shower NOW and I want to go faster because I want to go there....NOW.

Well here is something you can do which will save you so much energy it will literally pay for itself in the first year so effectively costing you nothing. It's the LITTLE PLUMBER electronic water de-scaler and scale prevention unit. Take a look at the picture of the scale taken from the inside of a water cylinder and you can see how it acts as an INSULATOR around the heat exchangers or immersion heater and this COSTS YOU A FORTUNE when heating up your water. So, twenty minutes and it's fitted. Simple as a pimple and looks nice too and will remove and prevent all that nasty limescale. Not only inside your heaters but also from the shower heads and everywhere else. You will also now get lovely soft water so your skin will feel softer, your hair will shine and you will have a better washday with far less soap powder. ALL THIS and a 12 month no quibble guarantee. Why wait????

Twitter

Hi guys. I have tried to get the hang of twitter. Have listened to the excited Californian drawl enthusing about it but so far I am completely lost as to what why how and where it helps. As Cameron says I think you have to be a bit of a twat to use it.

Anyone any ideas?

Two new features on our site

We have added two new features to our Little Plumber site. The first is a Win an LP1 competition. It's really easy. All you have to do is to click on the COMPETITION link and then answer the multiple choice question. We will have one winner a month and that winner will be the first person drawn at the end of the month. What can you lose? Exactly ! It's too good to miss.

The second feature is our new TESTER STRIP (pictured above) offer. All you have to do is ask and we will send you a TESTER STRIP. Just dip this in water and then when the strip changes colour, compare it to the coloured card on the site.

The best way to do this to stop you running backwards and forwards between the tap and your computer is to pour some clean tap water into a clean egg-cup or glass and bring it with you to you computer. The strips are small and can be used only once. You will soon see just how hard your water is. These strips are very accurate!

Don't forget we are always here to help and we don't have recorded messages and voice-mails. We generally answer the telephone straight and will help with any queries.

ECZEMA

ECZEMA


The aim of the Soft Water Eczema Trial (SWET) is to discover whether eczema can be improved by deliberately softening all water used in the home (except at one tap in the kitchen which will supply mains water for drinking)

Over 300 families have been invited to see whether the installation of a water softener will improve eczema and other skin conditions. The cost of this research is £1m funded by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme.

It seems to be pretty well known that people living in hard water areas suffer from eczema more than those in softer water areas so the experiment may well prove what many of us already know. Hard water causes more skin problems than soft water. No need to spend £1m finding that out.

So, the answer then is to install a water softener insn’t it? It seems either that or move to a soft water area. Now despite the problems associated with hard water including skin problems and certainly including the problems of limescale, hard water is actually very good for you. Everyone needs Calcium and there is a lot of it in hard water.

Calcium is essential for growing children and essential for proper cell metabolism. Without it we would have no teeth or skeletons.

It seems people who live in softer water areas where the Calcium content is lower may not suffer from skin problems but the level of heart attacks is greater. Anyway, if you use a softener you can’t drink the water and in fact require a dedicated tap in the kitchen for unsoftened water.

Now, if you want to have softer water with the Calcium still present, and you don’t want the hassle of a traditional salt filled softener and you want to get rid of eczema, you need a Little Plumber.

No chemicals or maintenance and you get a 12 MONTH MONEY BACK GUARANTEE so if your eczema doesn’t go then simply send back the LP unit for a full refund. Must be worth taking a chance! And they cost almost nothing to run and cost much less to buy than an “Old Salty”. And..you can fit them yourself.

FREE ENERGY SAVING DEVICE

FREE energy saving device

It virtually amounts to FREE ENERGY if you install a LITTLE PLUMBER water conditioner.

“Why” you ask?

If you live in a hard water area then you will undoubtedly be aware of the crusty formation of limescale around your taps and in your kettle.

What you can’t see is the layer upon layer of scale that has deposited on the heat exchangers in you boiler or hot water cylinder. These deposits can cause you huge energy loss because the heat generated simply cannot escape the heating elements to heat up the water. The limescale effectively acts as an insulator and stops generated heat from heating the water and this can cost a huge amount in extra wasted energy. Most domestic boilers in hard water areas will lose around £120 to £200 worth of energy in a year. The bigger the property, the more energy will be wasted.

Add to this the additional cost of replacing appliances like Dishwashers, Washing Machines plus the cost of corrosive chemicals to try and prevent limescale forming. Plus of course the additional cost of softeners salt and soaps to try and cope with all the problems of hard water and you can see that the total amount of money you waste each year is pretty substantial.

Enter the Little Plumber, which starts at under £100.00 and is absolutely GUARANTEED to remove and prevent limescale. In fact it is so good that Splendid Products Ltd who make the unit in Oxford will actually give you your money back if for “any reason” you are not completely satisfied with its performance.

So, by fitting a Little Plumber unit you will actually save more in a year than the unit costs you. You don’t have to be Einstein to work out that the saving is more than the cost so therefore the unit is virtually free. And if the saving in energy bills is greater than the cost of the unit then you are probably looking at a device that is not only FREE but will actually save you even more than it costs to start with.

Oh, and don’t forget…..it’s made in ENGLAND!!

Limescale prevented at Grimaldi House

Grimaldi Agencies have their UK Headquarters at Grimaldi House in St James Square in London.

They have installed a 150-litre tank, non-ventilated hot water cylinder running at 4.5 bars of pressure to heat all the water in the entire premises. The water is heated by two electric immersion heaters and it is on 24 hours a day. All might have been well if St James Square was in a soft water area but the water supply is unfortunately very hard.

The hard water caused such limescale precipitation on the immersion heaters that they had to be changed every week as they became very quickly encrusted with thick scale. This layer of scale not only increased the overall usage of electricity as the scale was preventing the heat transferring into the water but also caused the elements to fail regularly.

Banyards Ltd of Brune Street in London who are responsible for the maintenance of the hot water systems in Grimaldi House asked Splendid Products Ltd to advise on a simple method way of solving the problem which was in fact becoming something of a costly nightmare.

Splendid supplied an LP4 electronic water conditioner which was fitted by Banyards and now over three months has elapsed with no problems at all. A huge saving in terms of downtime and energy.

The LP4 costs around £3.00 a year to run and requires no maintenance once fitted. It is therefore not surprising that other facility managers are very interested in this cheap and very effective method of solving the expensive and time consuming problem of Limescale.

The LP units are all made in Oxford in the U.K. by Splendid products Limited

The Darling Buds of May

The Darling Buds of May

It really doesn’t matter what the Chancellor says in his important budget speech, the plain fact is that politicians in the main have let us the voters down, badly.

If the Darling buds are to bloom and we are to see the green shoots of recovery, we are going to have to do a hell of lot more than improve the efficiency of an over weaned, over burgeoning and generally overweight governmental system that has the weirdest bunch of groups known to man in it’s midst. Yes cut them out get rid of overpaid part-timers with their gold plated pensions and try and save the billions we need to stop generations of Britains carrying the weight of debt into the next millennium.

But there are ways we can stop waste now. We do need electric cars Mr Brown but despite hours spent on the ‘phone trying to find them I ask you seriously, where are they?

There’s a way all of us who put up with the scourge of limescale and hard water for instance can immediately stop the waste of heating up layers of scale in our boilers, make our washing machines and dishwashers last longer and generally have softer water without the need for “old salty” water softeners.

Just by fitting a Little Plumber unit in your house or premises you can save a fortune in heating bills, experience softer water and all for the magnificent sum of £3.00 a year in running costs.

Yes if you install one of these you really might start seeing the darling buds of may begin to bloom in the money you save. Your planet will thank you for it too since by using less energy you’ll produce less CO2 the greenhouse gas. It has been estimated that four power stations could be closed with the energy saved if everyone in the UK who lived in a hard water area fitted these units.
So Mr Darling, there’s something you could do straight away…just cut the tax on Little Plumbers and even give a grant to people in hard water areas towards buying one. Those darling buds might bloom quicker than you think and you wouldn’t have to sack anybody!!

WATER SOFTENERS: Water softeners convert HARD WATER into SOFT WATER

SOFT WATER is water with very few free Calcium ions CA++ and the usual method of extracting the Calcium Ions is called ION EXCHANGE. An ion exchange water softener uses special resins which are called “ion-excange resins”. The surface of these resins when they are fresh, firstly trap the Calcium ions and then release Sodium ions so removing hardness from the water but making the water richer in sodium ions. This ion exchange continues until there are so many calcium ions on the resins surface that they must be removed. This is done by adding a concentrated salt NaCl solution or BRINE and the process is called REGENERATION. The regeneration takes place in a seperate tank and it is here that the collected Calcium ions are removed and replaced once again with new Sodium ions. At this point the Sodium ions now affix themslevs to the resin releasing the Calcium ions which go back into solution and are washed away into a drain.

The resin is often in the shape a column and is itself inside a TANK of water. There is also of course a connecting REGENERATION tank.

The timing of the regeneration is oftened goverened by and timer or clock which sits on the top of the water softener. This timer can be electric or in some softeners like Kinetico the power comes from the movement of the water itself.

Water softeners need to be plumbed in by a professional plumber. The mains cold water feed into the property must be diverted through the water softener BUT a dedicated untreated cold water pipe must go to the kitchen sink to feed a drinking tap since softened water, rich in Sodium ions must not be drunk.

Salt must also be regularly put into the softener. The process of regeneration is accompanied by an alteration of water flow by an internal valve system which redirects water rich in Calcium down the drain.

ALTERNATIVES: Well you can see that the SOFTENER is a fairly complicated bit of kit. It not only needs salt but actually wastes a lot of water so people in HARD WATER areas now often choose an alternative…the electronic descaler. The Little Plumber range is among the most popular of these because not only have they been around along time but they also give a totoally unconditional 12 month full money back guarantee if the customer is not entirely happy with the performance.

WATER SOFTENERS for you home and business

What is a water softener?

A water softener is a device that makes HARD WATER soft. Hard water is water that has a high concentration of Calcium Carbonate dissolved into it. This happens when rainwater seeps through limestone and chalk in the ground before being collected into reservoirs and then fed or pumped to your house. Rainwater is slightly acidic because it has mixed with Carbon Dioxide in the atmoshphere to form CARBONIC ACID. This can be formulated as CO2+H20=H2CO3. The amount of C02 which dissolves into the water is dependent on the temperature of the rainwater and the colder it is the more C02 dissolves into it. When water heats up, the C02 evaporates off reducing the acidity of the water. This also happens when the atmospheric pressure is reduced since this literally “sucks” the C02 out of the water.

This “acidic” rainwater dissolves the Calcium Carbonate CaC03 in the ground which is present in the form of Limestone or Chalk (also as Aragonite, Calcite,Vaterite,Marble and Travertine) which when dissolved become ionised in the water as Calcium Bicarbonate. CaCO3 + CO2 + H20 = Ca (HC03)2. These ions float in the dissolved water as Ca++ and HCO3 - ions and will remain in solution until the water is either heated or the atmospheric pressure is reduced.

When the water now rich in these ions is heated, the CO2 leaves the water and the ions recombine into their original form as LIMESCALE. The CO2 also leaves the water when the pressure is reduced and this happens when water suddenly changes direction as in the L-bend in a pipe or when it suddenly leaves from a tap or shower head when it drops from a high pressure to a low pressure. Boiling or heating water quickly causes LIMESCALE to be deposited as is evidenced in hot water cylinders, boilers and kettles. Sudden pressure drop precipitations of LIMESCALE can be seen in pipes at L-bend , shower heads and taps.

(For the purpose of simple explanation we have not mentioned Magnesium Salts which are present in the ground as Dolomite since it is the Calcium salts which are the main cause of HARD WATER)

So the ions of Calcium and others are called the “hardness ions” and not only cause LIMESCALE
but also react with soaps to prevent proper lathering and can cause a “scum”. This scum is called Calcium Stearate.

LIMESCALE IN KENT & WILTSHIRE

White Cliffs of Dover and White Horse of Uffington

If you dig into the ground in certain parts of the British Isles you’ll soon find that you hit a hard white rock. This rock is commonly called LIMESTONE and in it’s softer form it is known as CHALK.

Dover in Kent has its famous WHITE CLIFFS and in Wiltshire the famous WHITE HORSE can be seen in the valley aptly named after it.

Beautiful as they are, the White Cliffs of Dover and the Vale of the White Horse pose a problem for the people who live there because it means they also have hard water.

Hard water is water which has run through a chalky layer of earth. The chalk, basically Calcium Carbonate, dissolves into the water, which came down as rain and then ends up in your house and can cause havoc with your pluming and appliances, as people who live in hard water areas will tell you.

The problem is not so much with the cold water, which contains masses of calcium ions in solution, because this water is very good for you. Children need high calcium content in the water to build bones and teeth and it has been shown too that high levels of calcium prevent heart attacks. In fact the Calcium ion is an important factor in the metabolism of all cells and without it we would all die.

No, the problem comes when you heat the water or change the water pressure because this forces the calcium ions out of solution and they then recombine with the carbonate ions to become what they were originally, which is Limestone or Chalk only now it’s a nasty hard substance called LIMESCALE.

Limescale that can be seen is the least of your worries, it’s the Limescale in the boilers and heaters that cause the major problem because here the thick deposit actually acts as an insulator and prevents heat escaping from the elements and heating up the water. This means your heating bills go through the roof. If you add to this the hugely damaging effect the limescale has on all your appliances, the restriction of water flowing in pipes and the mess it makes you soon realise you must do something about it…BUT WHAT?

The answer maybe a water softener as this will remove all the hardness from the water before it gets into your house. Water softeners in the main use salt and require plumbing. They are in fact just another thing to look after and without a constant re-fill of salt they fail.

But alternative help is at hand in the form of the Little Plumber range of electronic water softeners, which require no chemicals or maintenance. Costing a fraction of the price of a water softener they can be installed by a competent DIY-er and are actually guaranteed to work. They come with a 12-month no-quibble money back guarantee. So what have the people living in Kent and Wiltshire got to lose? Nothing it would seem. And if you live in one of the other areas of hard water nor have you.

HYPOCRISY OF THE ENERGY SAVING TRUST and the Like!

HYPOCRISY OF THE ENERGY SAVING TRUST and the like!

I have been badgering the Energy Saving Trust for months to endorse electronic water conditioners but all they do is fanny around saying “there’s only three of us and we don’t have the time or resources to test your product”. My God it makes your blood boil. I tell them that our Little Plumber range offers a full 12-month money back guarantee so that if the ruddy things don’t work the customer can send them back for a FULL REFUND…no quibble. (See http://www.littleplumber.com/)

It wouldn’t be so bad but we make these products right here in Oxford yes that’s England for heavens sake. We have estimated that if every house in the U.K. that is in a hard water area fitted one of these low cost devices you could save enough energy to close down FOUR POWER STATIONS. But do our little friends at these so called Energy Saving quango’s help. No Sireee.! The Carbon Trust and all the other “jobs for the boys” brigades fall into the same category and seem to think global warming was something developed so that they could have somewhere to spend the day drinking coffee and sending each other e-mails. Try calling them and you’ll get “I’m so sorry Jonny is away from his desk at the moment please leave a message”. You leave a message and some time at their convenience they might call you back.

Well, I expect they all get their pensions and it might just be the case that when they’re old enough to collect them they can see for themselves the massive effect their efforts had on changing the weather patterns due to global warming. You’ve got it COB ALL !!!!

Saving Energy The Easy Way

Limescale in a water cyliner

SAVE ENERGY THE EASY WAY

If perchance you live in a hard water area which many of us do, you will probably not realise that limescale builds up day by day throughout the plumbing system.

One area, which is really prone to limescale, is the boiler or hot water cylinder. As soon as hard water gets warm, the scale starts forming getting thicker and thicker so that in a fairly short period of time it takes almost twice as much energy to heat up the same amount of water. The scale keeps getting even thicker and eventually it just takes ages to heat the water. The amount of energy required to heat the same amount of water increases exponentially so the thicker the scale the more energy is required. In the end the scale can be so thick that if you turn on the immersion heater it will just blow because the heat it generates cannot escape into the water. The immersion heater just overheats and packs up.

In real terms this can mean more oil, gas or electricity to heat the same amount of water and of course more money. Money, which in reality is just being wasted.

So IF you can remove the limescale and PREVENT fresh limescale being deposited your water heating becomes much more efficient. It is really surprising that organisations like the Energy Saving Trust and Carbon Trust and all the other so called “green” organisations don’t latch on to this and plug products that do prevent and remove the dreaded limescale.

A very good product that will get rid of limescale and prevent new scale is produced by an English Company and is called Splendid Products Limited. They make (in Oxford) the Little Plumber range, which have been available for 10 years and are so successful that in those 10 years only one has ever been returned. Add to this the 12-month no quibble guarantee and the fact that if you fit one you’ll probably be saving the cost of the unit in the money you save and it’s really a “no brainer”!

Heating Costs

I was watching the news today and saw that a married couple who were pensioners and lived exclusively on their State Pension were paying nearly a third of their income on fuel during the
recent cold snap. I wondered how much energy they were waisting by heating up layers of limescale and how much lower their fuel bills might have been had they installed a Little Plumber. It's what you CAN'T SEE in your plumbing that's the real problem not the scale around the taps or shower heads or in the kettle. The heat exchangers in the hot water cylinder or boiler will have a thick layer of furry limescale in hard water areas and you can see the amount of energy wasted by looking at the graph on our site http://www.littleplumber.com/hardwaterinfo.html
So, spread the word. Fit a Little Plumber and your fuel bills will come down IF you have hard water. It's a fact!