magnetized water?

Last weekend my father-in-law was preaching to me about magnetized water and its health benefits after he had read an article about it somewhere. I usually don't pay attention to that sort of metaphysics, but it got me thinking so I browsed a bit on the internet.

I'm paraphrasing a bit, but apparently it can soften hard water (makes sense if the minerals are getting trapped by a magnet as the water passes over it), and lower PH. Also, a strong magnetic field can 'break up' clusters of water molecules and get them all pointing in the same direction. This allows organisms to absorb the water more efficiently. IF that's true it could also help with conversion in the mash, increase hop utilization (a bit of a stretch, I know) and carbonation.

None of this seems too far-fetched. I'm curious what the moral compass of the community says. Is this mysticism? Maybe I should go get one of those magnetic bracelets and convince myself Im cured of a bunch of illnesses I never had to begin with. (no offence to people who wear magnetic bracelets)

interesting. this thread needs aj and kai to do some sciences and experiments and such to break it down for simple folk like myself. i'm curious about this pseudo-science

I was a plumber in a former life and I sold DMX (as far as I know one of the more reputable companies that sells this technology) magnets for water conditioning. Let me just say I worked for one of the most crotchety, skeptical old plumbers to ever grace the profession and he was sold by what we saw. We lived in the Texas Hill Country and had incredibly hard water. We would remove water heaters that were 5 years old and had 150 pounds of limescale built up in them. After installing the magnets we would vacuum out this weird gel like substance instead of rocks. It was pretty amazing. It would be interesting to do some real experiments on the effects of magnetically treated water on brewing.

As a civil engineer, for the life of me, I can't imagine what these magnets do. Even if the magnetic field is strong enough to move ions in the water, as soon as the water gets past them, it goes back to turbulent flow and is completely mixed again.

The only way I could see it affecting water chemistry is if it forced ions to collide and form a precipitate. But you would think that, again, as soon as it got passed the magnet that it would reionize.

On the other hand, I never took a magnetic water chemistry class...

Well I just read through http://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=water-treatment

Their claim is that the magnetic field makes a greater percentage of the bicarbonate ions form aragonite instead of calcite. Aragonite and calcite have the same chemical formula (CaCO3) but aragonite doesn't scale whereas calcite does because of their different crystal structures.

This would mean that while the hardness of the water isn't changed, pipe scaling would be reduced.