71%, that’s how much of our Earth is covered by water. Due to such abundance, water has become a crucial aspect of every day life: whether is be powering dams, quenching thirsts, or fueling industries like the agricultural one. Despite it’s mundane appearance, water has many characteristics. One of the more important ones, and the one focused on in this particular lab, was the hardness of water. Water hardness is the amount of divalent metal cations, calcium and magnesium ions specifically, that have dissolved in water. As the concentrations of the calcium and magnesium ions increase, the hardness of the water also increases.1 Water hardness isn’t necessarily harmful to anyone’s health; yet it’s important to consider hardness because of its impact on various industries around the world. Very hard water has been known to cause the buildup of minerals in fixtures, plumbing pipes, water heaters, etc. In addition hard water has been known to minimize the efficiency of many hand soaps and washer detergents. As a result, residue tends to build up and can leave a layer of the minerals on whatever is being washed. Nonetheless, water hardness does have some advantages to it. Calcium and Magnesium are minerals in which people need in order to remain healthy. It’s also these minerals that help give water a invigorating flavor that a lot of people want.(1,2) Water hardness is more commonly measure in parts per million (PPM) of Calcium Carbonate and grains per gallons, yet for our
Density is the amount of matter per unit of measurement (Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 26 Aug. 2016.). If water has a density of 1.0 g/mL and you place a substance with a density of 1.8 g/mL the substance will sink because it is denser than water. Density is often measured in g/cm^3 or g/mL because the formula for density is D=m/v.
In the Chemistry of Natural Waters Lab we were to collect a sample of water, ranging from a fountain, stream, bottle, or tap water. After we collected the samples we all did many tests to see what the hardness was for each one. Water hardness is determined by the amount of Calcium and Magnesium in the water.(2) Water that has more Calcium or Magnesium is considered to be harder than water with less of those two elements. When you use soap and detergent, this is where you see water hardness coming into play in everyday life when you are washing things.
Having a hard water with Ca2+ and Mg2+ ions at home could be an annoying thing for many people. When hard water is heated the minerals in it precipitate out including the Ca+ and Mg+2 ions, these mineral start to form a coat on shower doors, bath tops, soap scums which result of addition of soap to hard water and people will find difficulty cleans with soap since hard water lose some affections in dissolving soaps as soaps get mixing with ions and less soap will be dissolving. As a response of this hard water problems water softener came to the market. Water softener works by exchange the hard water ions Ca2+ and Mg2+ with slats such as Na+ and k+ this way the hard water ions will be reduced or eliminated leading to better water quality [2].
High concentrations of minerals in soil can cause discolored leaves and stunted growth. Watering with distilled water, which has the recommended amount of indoor plant fertilizer added, provides an appropriate level of minerals. Distilled water is better than tap water for growing healthy plants. Tap water has additives like fluoride and chlorine that can affect a plant's growth.A study by the University Of Saskatchewan's Department of Plant Sciences on the effects of tap water on plant growth showed that tap water exposes plants to harmful substances like salt, magnesium and calcium. Distilled water, on the other hand, is processed by boiling the water into vapor to remove all impurities and then recondensing it to be bottled. Although distilled water comes at a premium, it is much better for the plants than what comes out of a kitchen faucet.Store-bought bottles labeled as "mineral water" may contain from 1,000 to 3,000 parts per million dissolved solids. Watering plants with such mineral-rich water will very quickly create a mineral build-up in the
In most places, people don't notice that tap water is too contaminated to be safe to drink. First of all, contaminated water can hurt you. Tap water contains trace amounts of lead and mercury which will build up in your body. Also, chlorine in water, which is used to get rid of bacteria in water, can also hurt you. Besides,
The Results from ETDA (table 7) show that tap water Mifflin Hall (400 ppm) is hardest than the four other water samples. It is followed by tap water Harleysville (340 ppm), well Water Wyckoff (320 ppm), Stream Water Raleigh (110 ppm) and Tap water Yosemite (80 ppm). This order supports my hypothesis. Tap water Yosemite is relatively soft compared to the other water samples. I have predicted my sample to be the hardness and tap water Yosemite to be the softest. Also, these results support my hypothesis in the assumption that they show that stream water Raleigh is moderately hard as expected. Nevertheless, I expected tap water Yosemite to be relatively soft but the data show that it is moderately hard. In fact, I assumed that tap water Yosemite would be slightly hard because in California ground water is stored in alluvium. They are made up of loose gravel, sands, and silts and they contain a very low concentration of divalent cations. Maybe the fact that rocks vary from the state of California due to the difference in geology might
In The Water Wars written by Cameron Stracher, humanity struggles to survive in a parched, dry, and post-apocalyptic Earth. The narrator, Vera, lives with his brother Will in the Republic of Illinowa, once a part of the United States. Everything in her life was normal until she and her brother decided to venture on a dangerous and perilous journey beyond their republic in order to save Kai, a boy who somehow seems to have unlimited drinking water. All the dangers and events unfolded because of one key decision made by Vera.
A quite common characteristic of water is water hardness, a component that is applicable to various uses. Water hardness is characterized as water with dissolved divalent cations, primarily highly dissolvable Ca2+ and Mg2+ions. While the concept of water hardness is an age-old term, dating back to Hippocrates, our
This makes sense because distilled water has most of its impurities removed. The conductivity of river water in the United States is anywhere between 50 S/cm to 1500 S/cm and industrial waters can be as high as 10,000 S/cm (EPA 2012). When we tested Sample 1, it had an average conductivity of 1223 S/cm which is on the higher end of the conductivity of river water in the United States. Sample 2 had an average conductivity of 222 S/cm which is on the lower end of the conductivity of river water. Sample 3 had an average conductivity of 1 S/cm, which is on the lower end of the conductivity for distilled water. Sample 3 was an outlier in this set of data. Sample 4 had an average conductivity of 215 S/cm which, like Sample 2, is on the lower end of the conductivity of river water. The well water had the highest conductivity and the city water from Bowling Green tested to have a conductivity of distilled water which was an outlier in our data. The other two samples, which were both from the University of Toledo campus, were about the
If you have lived in Kentucky very long you know what “hard water” is and how it leaves a scale on our bathroom fixtures, clogs our hot water tanks, makes it hard for soaps to lather and clean our clothes, leaves
The purpose of this lab was to calculate the percent of water mass the copper (II)
Water is essential for life as we know it on earth. It is used by plants
Hard water is the water that has a high amount of mineral in it, usually Ca2+ and Mg+. These cations enter the source of water by leaching from minerals within a wet underground layer of water- bearing rock, or an aquifer. According to the WHO, hard water is not harmful to human’s health but it’s a serious problem in the water industry. Household plumbing and appliances are also greatly affected by hard water conditions. Some of the effects include clogged pipes, water heater inefficiency and hard scaling. Hard water is also linked to decreased water flow or water pressure and seized (frozen) valves in faucets,
Water is a human right, not a commodity. It is the essence of life, sustaining every living being on the planet. Without it we would have no plants, no animals, no people. However, while water consumption doubles every twenty years our water sources are being depleted, polluted and exploited by multinational corporations. Water privatization has been promoted by corporations and international lending institutions as the solution to the global water crises but the only one’s who benefit from water privatization are investors and international banks. The essential dilemma of privatization is that the profit interests of private water utilities ultimately jeopardizes the safeguarding of the human right to water. Access to clean, sufficient
There is a balloon the shape and size of a beach ball. A string keeps it tethered to the ground. Someone in a white lab coat stands about eight feet away with a rod about as