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Clothes washed in hard water often look dingy and feel harsh and scratchy. The hardness minerals combine with some soils to form insoluble salts, making them difficult to remove. Soil on clothes can introduce even more hardness minerals into the wash water. Continuous laundering in hard water can damage fibers and shorten the life of clothes by up to 40 percent.

Under a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), NSF International completed tests that verify the claims of three residential point-of-use water treatment systems. Point-of-use systems are designed to treat drinking water coming from a single dispensing point, such as a kitchen faucet, and usually treat only the cold water supply. The test results indicated that these residential drinking water treatment systems could reduce waterborne bacteria and viruses in the event of intentional contamination within a municipal or private water supply during a homeland security incident.

Testing was conducted in conjunction with the EPA National Homeland Security Research Center and Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) Program. The three water treatment devices tested reduced biological agent surrogates that represented possible biological contaminants. The surrogates were selected by experts from government agencies and academia working on water security. The units were tested using five different microorganisms, and the ability of the devices to reduce the concentration of each was measured and verified.

All three products tested are reverse osmosis systems, comprised of a membrane separation technology, that removes the biological surrogate microorganisms. Further information about these products, including test results, is available on the ETV website. information from Nsf website.

Nitrates are inorganic chemicals dissolved in some water supplies as a result of feedlot and agricultural activities. Nitrate levels over 45 mg/L as actual NO3 (or 10 mg/L as Nitrogen, N) can be a serious health risk to infants and children.