Water Conditioning System for Plumbed in Duetto
-
NoahDavis
- Posts: 1
- Joined: 12 years ago
Hi Everybody!
I am currently under construction and my new kitchen will have a dedicated espresso bar where I will plumb in a Alex Duetto II.
I will be installing a Kinetico whole house water system on the water main so that every tap is supplied with soft, chlorine free water. This system softens the water through ION exchange.
The sales guy is pushing an additional RO drinking water system really hard. At first I dismissed it, but after reading through forums here I'm realizing that it may be wiser to get the RO system and have a re-mineralization filter running to the espresso machine.
Mr. Sales Guy says that these will be the stats of my water with the water softener alone and then with the RO system/remineralization added.
TDS:
Softener - 200
RO w/minerals - 60
CALCIUM HARDNESS:
Softener - 9,
RO w/minerals - 3-4
PH:
Softener - 8.5
RO w/minerals - 7
SODIUM
Softener - 200ppm
RO w/minerals - 0 - 10
The more I read about water quality, the stupider I feel. I find it very confusing! But from what I can tell the RO system with mineralization seems like it would give decent parameters for espresso, EXCEPT for a low TDS.
Does the TDS matter so much if the rest of the numbers are in line?
Will the straight softened water give me horrible shots?
Does anybody have experience with comparable equipment?
Thanks! Have a beautiful day!
noah
I am currently under construction and my new kitchen will have a dedicated espresso bar where I will plumb in a Alex Duetto II.
I will be installing a Kinetico whole house water system on the water main so that every tap is supplied with soft, chlorine free water. This system softens the water through ION exchange.
The sales guy is pushing an additional RO drinking water system really hard. At first I dismissed it, but after reading through forums here I'm realizing that it may be wiser to get the RO system and have a re-mineralization filter running to the espresso machine.
Mr. Sales Guy says that these will be the stats of my water with the water softener alone and then with the RO system/remineralization added.
TDS:
Softener - 200
RO w/minerals - 60
CALCIUM HARDNESS:
Softener - 9,
RO w/minerals - 3-4
PH:
Softener - 8.5
RO w/minerals - 7
SODIUM
Softener - 200ppm
RO w/minerals - 0 - 10
The more I read about water quality, the stupider I feel. I find it very confusing! But from what I can tell the RO system with mineralization seems like it would give decent parameters for espresso, EXCEPT for a low TDS.
Does the TDS matter so much if the rest of the numbers are in line?
Will the straight softened water give me horrible shots?
Does anybody have experience with comparable equipment?
Thanks! Have a beautiful day!
noah
-
Peppersass
- Supporter ❤
- Posts: 3694
- Joined: 15 years ago
What is the mineral composition of your tap water now, before installing the whole-house system?
You must have very hard water if the "Softener" is putting out water with TDS of 200 (assuming that's PPM) and hardness of 9 (assuming that's grains, which at 17.1 ppm/grain equals about 154 PPM.) That's about as hard as my well water, which causes lime scale in anything that heats water.
Why does the salesman think you need an RO/remineralization system for your drinking water? Is there something bad in the water that the Softener isn't removing? If not, there's certainly nothing wrong with drinking hard water. I do it all the time. Friends come over to our house with empty jugs to take home some of our well water because it tastes so good.
If it's just for coffee, you certainly don't need a whole-house RO/remineralization system. It will be a heck of a lot more expensive than a conventional softening system for coffee. No doubt, that's what your salesman is hoping for.
For a couple hundred bucks or so, you can get a commercial-quality cation system that will take the hardness down to zero. The resulting TDS depends on your water composition. The cation system will leave the alkalinity component intact, which doesn't cause lime scale by itself, and that usually is a component of TDS. For example, my tap water TDS, hardness and alkalinity are all in the 150 ppm range. After filtering with a cation system, the hardness is zero, but the alkalinity and TDS are still around 150 ppm.
Some feel that the salt used by cation system affects the taste of the coffee (I don't), and others believe it undermines extraction (unproven impact, in my opinion.) So, another relatively inexpensive solution would be the Claris system. It's basically an RO/remineralization system, but it does it's job simply by mixing in some tap water with the RO. You can adjust the mix to achieve a range of hardness and TDS values. This approach affects the concentration of all minerals in the water, not just the hardness component. I used a Claris system for a while, but found that the pH of the water it produced was too low, about 6.25, and went back to a cation system. I think this depends a lot on the composition of the input water.
If there's a compelling non-coffee reason to buy the RO/remineralization system from your salesman, then I wouldn't worry about the numbers. The TDS is a little lower than recommended, but bear in mind that there are locations (like San Francisco) with lower TDS and they make great coffee. You should never use pure RO in your machine because it tends to be acidic, which is bad for the machine. It doesn't make good coffee, either, because you do need some minerals for proper extraction. But no one has really proven that 100 TDS is required to make great coffee. I suspect that the quality of the extraction is a much more complex function of exactly what's in your water.
One thing you want to be sure about if you use an RO/remineralization system: the pH should not be under 7. Acidic water isn't good for the machine. The pH quoted above for the RO/remineralization system is good, but you better get that in writing if you go down that path.
You must have very hard water if the "Softener" is putting out water with TDS of 200 (assuming that's PPM) and hardness of 9 (assuming that's grains, which at 17.1 ppm/grain equals about 154 PPM.) That's about as hard as my well water, which causes lime scale in anything that heats water.
Why does the salesman think you need an RO/remineralization system for your drinking water? Is there something bad in the water that the Softener isn't removing? If not, there's certainly nothing wrong with drinking hard water. I do it all the time. Friends come over to our house with empty jugs to take home some of our well water because it tastes so good.
If it's just for coffee, you certainly don't need a whole-house RO/remineralization system. It will be a heck of a lot more expensive than a conventional softening system for coffee. No doubt, that's what your salesman is hoping for.
For a couple hundred bucks or so, you can get a commercial-quality cation system that will take the hardness down to zero. The resulting TDS depends on your water composition. The cation system will leave the alkalinity component intact, which doesn't cause lime scale by itself, and that usually is a component of TDS. For example, my tap water TDS, hardness and alkalinity are all in the 150 ppm range. After filtering with a cation system, the hardness is zero, but the alkalinity and TDS are still around 150 ppm.
Some feel that the salt used by cation system affects the taste of the coffee (I don't), and others believe it undermines extraction (unproven impact, in my opinion.) So, another relatively inexpensive solution would be the Claris system. It's basically an RO/remineralization system, but it does it's job simply by mixing in some tap water with the RO. You can adjust the mix to achieve a range of hardness and TDS values. This approach affects the concentration of all minerals in the water, not just the hardness component. I used a Claris system for a while, but found that the pH of the water it produced was too low, about 6.25, and went back to a cation system. I think this depends a lot on the composition of the input water.
If there's a compelling non-coffee reason to buy the RO/remineralization system from your salesman, then I wouldn't worry about the numbers. The TDS is a little lower than recommended, but bear in mind that there are locations (like San Francisco) with lower TDS and they make great coffee. You should never use pure RO in your machine because it tends to be acidic, which is bad for the machine. It doesn't make good coffee, either, because you do need some minerals for proper extraction. But no one has really proven that 100 TDS is required to make great coffee. I suspect that the quality of the extraction is a much more complex function of exactly what's in your water.
One thing you want to be sure about if you use an RO/remineralization system: the pH should not be under 7. Acidic water isn't good for the machine. The pH quoted above for the RO/remineralization system is good, but you better get that in writing if you go down that path.
