It’s just a small plastic box with two blue wires coiled around the water intake pipes, but for the last 15 years it has solved Jasper’s hard water problem for John Ogilvy.

“The problem started when Jasper switched from lake water to well water,” Ogilvy said. “The wells were sunk in limestone and that put calcium carbonate in the water.”

The newest wells made Jasper’s hard water problem worse – but not for Ogilvy.

The engineer and former town councillor looked to Britain for the solution - not to a conventional water softener that requires a steady diet of salt to neutralize the minerals that make water hard and clog shower heads.

“London is built on limestone, so the water there is very hard, much harder than here,” he said.

British engineers years ago came up with a simple, elegant  answer: a system that induces an electric field in the water pipe, temporarily altering the molecular structure of the water and stopping the lime from setting up in a hard, scaly deposit,  Ogilvy explained.

Sold under the Water-King trade name, the device removed built-up calcium carbonate deposits from water pipes in Ogilvy’s home, erased a bathtub ring and dissolved scales from the water closet of the toilet.

“It cost about $350, it was effortless to install and costs nothing to operate,” he said, “and it doesn’t change the taste of the water.”