Water good idea! Go with the flow

By Miranda Robertson miranda@westdorsetmag.co.uk

Now I know I’m old. I’ve just got ridiculously excited at the thought of having a water softener! It’s the thought of all the savings I’ll make – from hundreds of pounds a year saved by not having a hot water tank full of limescale, to saving as much as 70% on shampoo, soap and conditioner and hundreds of pounds a year on washing liquid for our clothes. No word of a lie –I am feeling positively gleeful about the prospect – despite never having given water softeners a second’s thought in my life before.

It’s all the fault of Tom Purse, 44, of the Dorset Water Centre based in Broadmayne.

Tom is dad to three boys and was going through a divorce while working as a manager in Tesco. The split made him re-evaluate what he was doing for a living, which involved lots of weekend working, and would have prevented him seeing his kids so much. He retrained as a plumber then, a few years later he bought the established Dorset Water Centre, and his dad Graham joined him in the business.

Graham, now 68, has stayed on as financial director and it’s a proper family affair, with Tom’s son Ryan having built the website and son Blake maintaining it.

The centre started life as Waterwise Investments Ltd in Sherborne in 1977

– one of the first independent water softener companies in the country. Dorset Water Centre was established on the Grove Trading Estate in Dorchester in 1984 before moving to Broadmayne in 2020 after a massive flood. We all know there’s hard water around here, but we just get on with it. Most of Tom’s customers are incomers, or those with newbuilds, who are used to not having to scrub the bathroom every five minutes: “We reckon you can save 40 hours a year cleaning,” he said. Not only do the gadgets –which come in a wide range of shapes and sizes for anything from a single person to a 200-bed hotel – save cleaning (and in the case of a hotel significant staff time) they save appliances wearing out prematurely. And – lest I forget, and one of the reasons I am so excited – they will make your hair and skin softer, too. OMG.

The costs of running them are low – a typical softener for an average house will use £3-£4 of salt a month. And the units themselves start at about £500, going up to £1,600 for one that might last 20 years or more.

Tom also does a nice line in Quooker boiling water taps – one of which he shows me dispensing boiling water, then chilled water then – incredibly –sparkling water! At £3,000 this is well out of my