Do people generally use strips for testing their water or are there digital readers that anyone could recommend?
Bottled Water and Descalling Espresso Machine
dutchy101 Do people generally use strips for testing their water or are there digital readers that anyone could recommend?
I believe Rob likes to look at a strip! 🤔
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MWJB It makes more sense to use the Zero jug with harder water, like your tap water, then mx to get around 50mg/l alkalinity.
That would also put up the hardness potentially causing scales on the Minima, is it not? Of course, the proportion is important.
Another thing, how consistently, the zero jug can really stay zero. I don’t know, but, I am not sure it can stay that way thru the life cycle of the filter.
😊
According to my water company, my water has 116 mg/l of calcium and total hardness of 290 mg/l.
I will receive a TDS testing reader with the Zero jug. I currently use a britta water filter in my fridge for drinking water.
Would there be any reason not to run my tap water through the Britta and then through the Zero?
LMSC No, this is what I have been doing on/off for a while. If you want to aim 40mg/l rather than 50, that’s fine. Zero jug comes with a cheap TDS meter and you are advised to change filters when the meter detects 6ppm…used to take me 3-4 months at about a litre per day (you are supposed to change filters every 2 months for jug filters generally).
Zerowater is literally that, 0ppm TDS (or <6ppm at worst). You wouldn’t put that in a boiler.
dutchy101 Your hardness is 290ppm as CaCO3 because that is 116*2.5 (that is the factor that converts calcium hardness as ion to CaCO3). Evidently you have no magnesium in your water.
There is no point Brita filtering your tap water prior to putting it in the Zero jug. Buy a bigger Zero jug that you think you need, because it is slow to filter.
So Ive just seen a drop kit suggested by Rob in another thread that I’ll be purchasing and I’ll try managing the water using this and ther zero whilst I await deluvery of the Skuma.
Thanks to everyone for their help - this is a new area to me but something I need to get my head around before I take delivery of a Minima
Could you post a link to the drop kit suggested?
Ross
Sure - was this one:
From this thread, which I would recommend reading is quite a useful read too:
https://coffeetime.freeflarum.com/d/118-water-calculator-scaling-potential-and-remineralisation
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The hardness in tap water comes from carbonate salts as the majority source. There may be some additional sources in there too but dropping alkalinity down by cutting with zero water is almost certainly going to reduce hardness down to the point scaling won’t occur. Hardness would have to be roughly double alkalinity for scaling at brew boiler temps (at 40mg/l alkalinity). There’s probably an exception out there I just don’t think I’ve seen it.
LMSC Testing would mean destruction testing. I wouldn’t do that on my own equipment, so I use the consensus recommendations of people much cleverer than me, that have stood the test of scrutiny & review for 20yrs. :-) I have read every coffee related water paper I could find.
I prefer to keep my testing to things that don’t have catastrophic failure modes :-)
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Rob1 Hardness would have to be roughly double alkalinity for scaling at brew boiler temps (at 40mg/l alkalinity).
Thanks Rob. Is this generally the case for water in general or if this is zero water specific — because my question was zero water related.
How does this (hardness roughly doubling alkalinity) play for the service boiler please ?
MWJB Testing would mean destruction testing.
Thanks Mark! Sorry, didn’t quite understand this statement. Could you clarify please? 😊
When I said testing - I assumed drawing water from the boiler, letting it return to the room temperature and using drip kit to measure hardness.
Sorry, perhaps, I should have clarified! Thx
LMSC Sorry, didn’t mean to be mysterious, to my mind testing which water is good, which corrodes to problematic level, and which scales to a problematic level means 3 machines equally fed with different water, one of which survives. My Dad has done the scale test on a Gaggia Classic & 260ppm hardness/190ppm alkalinity water, stripped it twice in 6yrs, now it’s a project machine in my spare room. :-)
I have tested water, boiled it, then retested and I don’t recall seeing a difference…even if there is, I’m not sure this is meaningful if we already know the relationship between hardness, alkalinity, pH, temp & LSI predictions (all based on incoming, ambient water).
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MWJB Nicely explained ! Thank you.
Wow! your dad is a legend! I am not surprised water, brewing and stat have become your natural qualities.
I would never feed the machine with water having such levels of hardness and alkalinity. The only testing I have been doing since getting my Evo is a drop kit test for hardness and alkalinity of the re-mineralised RO water, which I regularly draw from the service boiler to find evidences of scale forming.
LMSC Thanks Rob. Is this generally the case for water in general or if this is zero water specific — because my question was zero water related.
How does this (hardness roughly doubling alkalinity) play for the service boiler please ?
I’m not sure what you mean by that really. Zero water is basically pretty close to pure, similar to RO. If you’re asking how long the jugs remain effective for I don’t know, but if you’re diluting to 40mg/l alkalinity all the time you’ll get consistent results you’ll just need to use more water from the jug as the filter wears out (the filter might not gradually stop working).
At service boiler temps it drops, say around 125c above approx 50mg/l hardness: 40mg/l alkalinity will scale.
If you pull water from a service boiler to test it, if scale is forming your test will always show the water as non-scaling afterwards. You can use a test to see if the water has more minerals compared to what you’ve been putting in, but you can’t determine when it started scaling and how much scale has formed without knowing how much water you’ve lost when steaming.