For some time my hot-soak cleaning solution has been 2:1 sodium percarbonate and sodium metasilicate mix, used at around 25g/gallon. More recently after helpful advice from the forum I started adding Calgon water softening powder to the mix, to stop things scaling up during long soaks, which it does seem to do. I don't actually know how much calgon powder to add; it suggests something like 65ml per wash cycle for hard water (its designed to go in the washing machine) so I've extrapolated rightly or wrongly to an estimate of 7ml/gallon.
However I now get a much more dense white sediment forming and settling on the upper surfaces of whatever is being soaked, it seems to be a very smooth finely packed sediment and it can be pretty hard to blast off even with a hose jet when rinsing. Its not as bad as the scaling would have been, but its still a bit of an issue where things are inaccessible, like inside pipes and so on.
As mentioned in the past, I'm sadly no chemist and I'm not sure if this is the calgon powder working, or the powder itself not staying suspended in solution, or if its even pulling some of my sodium cleaners out of suspension; does anyone have any idea?
Cheers
Kev
Fall-Out from Calgon Powder/ chelators?