Ken Fox wrote:Which should be taken with several large boulders of salt, given the fact that the SCAA's water quality recommendations were largely written by a commercial sponsor who sells water treatment equipment.

This is simply untrue.

Marshall wrote:This is simply untrue.

Hi Marshall,

Are you saying that these "standards" weren't largely written by the head of Cirqua?

This topic has been discussed at great length in previous threads on this board. In the interest of preserving bandwidth, I direct the interested reader to these threads:

TDS & Water Softening: The SCAA Water Quality Handbook

"Paradigm shift" away from over-softened water

ken

One part of the plumb in/out or not story is that when a machine is fully plumbed there is no reason to not flush/clean/preheat cups etc. I remember when I still had a bucket for the drain I'd see it filling up and want to make it last (I have a hard time lifting anything like an almost full 5 gal. bucket). Since my plumber put in a direct, copper p-trap (to deal with the heat of monthly Cafex backflush) I can now rinse, flush, clean to my hearts content. Supply was plumbed from the start.
KDM

Marshall wrote:I also wanted to avoid the salt ion (cation) softeners, per the SCAA's strong warning.

Speaking of this... I was experimenting with a different water one day, and ran some fairly soft water (KH of 35.8 ppm) through the intank cation softener on the mini vivaldi ii with some very interesting results. IDK if you would call that espresso. The puck was a strange muddy texture and could never pull properly.

baristalab wrote:Speaking of this... I was experimenting with a different water one day, and ran some fairly soft water (KH of 35.8 ppm) through the intank cation softener on the mini vivaldi ii with some very interesting results. IDK if you would call that espresso. The puck was a strange muddy texture and could never pull properly.

Well that certainly clears things up. You took some (god-knows-what soft water), ran it through an in tank softener in an unknown state of functioning (producing an even more unclear resulting water) then found that the espresso (made with some unknown coffee prepared in some unclear way) was not to your liking.

Thanks for clarifying the issue for us.

ken

Sorry Ken. My bad, you're right. I'm still working on the issue.

I have a wild guess though: Putting the soft water through the cation softener makes the water too soft for espresso (maybe I'm seeing something like Jim was seeing with his RO water in insanely long water FAQ). The water tastes a bit on the salty side, so I'll assume it's too high in sodium (maybe from the soft water running through cation). From what I've read, sodium doesn't seem to be too good for brewing coffee, so maybe I'm seeing the result of that.

Also when I was running water that was KH 125.3 ppm, I was making pretty good espresso with everything else the same. This isn't perfect, so we're still looking at god knows what for a lot of other things.

Have a great weekend guys!

All of this stuff is way too complicated to simplify by the process used to produce the water that comes out the other end (other than RO or Distillation, both of which produce nearly "pure" demineralized H20, regardless of the water that is input).

I am beyond certain that one can produce a good substrate water for making espresso or other coffee beverages, using a cation softener, as long as the input water is suitable. Now I am not sure exactly what it is that makes some water "suitable" and some other water "not-suitable." Certainly, if the input water tastes badly and is high in calcium carbonate, a cation softener is not going to produce a good substrate water unless the input water is treated with more than the softener. And I am sure that there are other input waters that might also be hard, that won't work out for espresso if passed solely through a cation softener.

BUT, a cation softener is a cheap and very good solution to water that is too hard, in many instances. It certainly works very well with the municipal water where I live, which tastes good but which is hard (it comes from Rocky Mountain well water). Not all hard water will perform as well.

Water treatment needs to be individualized to the input water, if the goal is to produce a good espresso extraction, with minimal need for machine descaling. This is NOT one-size-fits-all, in spite of what Cirqua and the other water treatment purveyors (encouraged by their beloved trade-association-sponsee the SCAA) would have you believe.

ken