From: THE ASPEN TIMES, a newspaper published in Aspen, Colorado. Vol. 8, No. 128, June 28, 1995
MAGIC MAGNETS -- THEY WORK, WHY ASK HOW?
By Su Lum
I am not very conscious of (some would say oblivious to) my surroundings, so it took me a while to notice that something was wrong with my hot water
heater. It had blown up, I might have noticed it immediately, but it petered out gradually.
Over the course of months, something seemed faintly awry. The dishes were grungy -- maybe the dishwasher, which came with the
house in 1972, was finally giving up the ghost. The laundry was looking grey, too -- was the washer dying as well? When the shower started turning cold I finally pinpointed the culprit, and when it got so bad that only
three inches of hot water could be drawn in the tub I called the plumber.
His diagnosis was rock-hard sediment build-up, which could only be dislodged using dangerous acids which he didn't recommend and wouldn't
attempt himself. Prescription: a new heater.
Bruce, my daughter Hillery's husband, said he'd shop around for a new hot water heater. While so doing, several people advised him to consider magnets. Bruce had read about
them, found a distributor in Basalt who swore by them, and broached the subject to me.
"You're going to think this is crazy, but you might want to try it," he said. The basic idea was that special magnets,
when applied to the main water pipe, would not only dissolve the sediment in the hot water heater, but would ream out all the hardened arteries of my gurgling plumbing system and soften the water. Four hundred dollars,
with a 90-day guarantee. Widely used in Europe.
The magnets appealed to Bruce's sense of thrift. He hated the idea of throwing out a perfectly good water heater if there were any other solution. Also, since he and
Hillery are in the process of renovating two old houses in the secret Shangri La where they live, he wanted to know if they would actually work.
To my mind he might as well have suggested that I put a pyramid on the
water heater, but there was nothing to lose except another three months of tepid baths. Wotthehell.
When Dan Vories arrived with two small boxes containing my $400 magnets, my skepticism was apparent. He said he
didn't blame me -- he would never have bought them himself were it not for the guarantee; now he was a born-again magnet believer and selling them.
It took fewer than five minutes for him to whip down into my spidery
crawl space and apply the magnets; in a month he'd return to flush out the hot water heater and then I'd have two months to decide whether or not I wanted my money back.
He showed me before and after pictures of a
scaly rock garden and went into the theory of MagnetoHydroDynamics, but his explanation fell on deaf ears. I don't know how anything works. Either the magic magnets would solve the hot water problem or they wouldn't,
and I strongly suspected that they wouldn't.
If I hadn't been paying attention, I might not have noticed that gradually the water got hotter, the bath a little deeper, the glassware less mottled. Three weeks into the
experiment I remembered to mention it to Tania, an artist who rents my back shed. "I was going to ask if you had put in some kind of water-softener," she said, so she had noticed something, too, without prior
knowledge. Sacre Bleu! were the magnets really working? Should I get another pair to apply to my body as a preventative for arteriosclerosis?
I eagerly anticipated the flushing, but when the day came it was a
disappointment. I expected that at least thirty gallons of sludge would spew out of my 50-gallon water heater, but after five or six gallons of greyish water it ran almost clear. The residue sank to the bottom of the
holding buckets, proving, Dan said, that the magnets had dissolved the build-up, but it didn't seem dramatic enough. How could that little pile of sediment have cut my hot water supply in half?
We waited for the
flushed heater to go through the process of warming its new water. It didn't take as long as I thought it would, but I don't know how hot water heaters work, either. Then Dan ran the tub and loa foot of hot water and it
was still coming.
After he left, I sank into the tub. During the months of shallow lukewarm splashings, I had forgotten the pleasures of a deep, hot tub. Whatever their mysterious ways, the magic magnets seem to have
effected a small miracle, a hot bath, and that is all I know, and all I need to know.
Su Lum is a longtime local who doesn't want her money back. Her column appears every Wednesday in the Aspen Times.
-Aspen, Colorado
