CoyoteOldMan
I watched the excellent Whole Latte Love vid on water treatment. Most comprehensive.
He’s a BTW man through and through, and he showed the big plumbed in stuff which comes with a test kit and a longevity rating according to the hardness test result.
The resin bags come with fewer guidlines for use than a kitchen sponge! They tell you how to activate it (= soak) and to change it every year (Rocket) or six months (BTW) and hope for the best.
I do rate BTW stuff, and I’ve written to their technical team today to get some guidlines for the Ashbeck water spec. I’ll post here if they send a response.
I’m also having second thoughts about descaling atm after reading the Clive Coffee blurb. They say descaling canbreak off pieces of scale big enough to block channels etc, that usually scale gathers on the element and water level probe and the boilers themselves are usually OK.
This fits in with my own observation when I removed the faulty element. The element was caked, the water level probe had some scale, but the boiler walls looked absolutely clear. I’ve got a brand new element in now, I gave the water level probe a damn good thrashing to clean it up, so it’s really the brew group and wands that are the question marks. My Puly caff arrived this morning for the brew group, so Im thinking of deferring descaling until I really need to.
One suggestion was to use the “litmus” style test srips to check the water quality regularly, and zap the tank only when it looks unacceptable.
I’m going to sleep on it and decide tomorrow.
