Edinburgh's supply comes largely off the Pentland Hills and through Glencorse and Talla. It is soft. That has consequences for your bath that most people never think about.
By Richard · 38 years bath repair, Edinburgh & Scotland
I have worked on baths in London, in the Midlands, and across Scotland. The difference the water makes is not subtle.
Water picks up its character from the ground it moves through. Chalk and limestone country — much of southern and eastern England — produces hard water, loaded with dissolved calcium and magnesium.
On an enamel surface, hard water leaves scale. Scale is abrasive, it holds staining, and the cleaning products people reach for to remove it are aggressive. Over years, that cycle of deposition and scrubbing thins the enamel. The waterline goes first, because that is where the deposit sits.
Edinburgh draws largely from the Pentlands and the reservoirs south of the city. The water passes over igneous and metamorphic rock, which gives up very little in the way of dissolved minerals. The result is soft.
Soft water leaves almost no scale. Soap lathers freely, which is why visitors from the south notice they need less of everything. And on a bath surface it means the enamel is not being continually deposited on and scoured off.
The enamel does, yes. In my experience the surfaces here wear more slowly than in hard-water regions, and I resurface fewer baths purely for scale-related wear.
What Edinburgh baths suffer from instead is age and impact. The city's housing stock is old, and a great many of its baths are a century into service. Enamel thins at the taps and the waterline through sheer use. Chips come from dropped objects. And soft water, being slightly more acidic, is marginally less forgiving to exposed bare metal once a chip has gone through.
A chip in an enamel-on-steel or cast iron bath exposes bare metal. Bare metal rusts. The rust creeps outward beneath the surrounding enamel and lifts it, and by the time you can see the problem it is much larger than what you can see.
In Edinburgh that process is not slowed by scale deposits sealing the chip over. Water reaches the metal.
So: a chip repaired within a few months is a straightforward job at £140. The same chip ignored for two years is often a full resurface. That is the single most useful thing I can tell an Edinburgh bath owner.
Portobello, Joppa, Newhaven, Musselburgh. Salt air accelerates corrosion at any exposed metal, and a chipped bath in a promenade flat will rust visibly faster than the same chip in Morningside. Worth catching early.
Where we work
Common questions
Is Edinburgh's water hard or soft?
Soft. The supply comes largely off the Pentlands and the reservoirs to the south, over rock that gives up very little dissolved mineral. Very little limescale as a result.
Does soft water damage bath enamel?
No — it is gentler on enamel than hard water, because there is no scale cycle of deposition and scrubbing. But once a chip exposes bare metal, soft water offers no protective deposit, so rust starts sooner.
How often should an Edinburgh bath be resurfaced?
There is no schedule. A properly resurfaced bath lasts a decade or more. Most of my work is on baths that have never been resurfaced at all — some of them a hundred years old.
No call-out charge anywhere in Edinburgh or the Lothians. Send a photo of the damage and we'll price it honestly.