Has anyone here used potassium chloride in their "espresso water softener" instead of sodium chloride, and if you have, did you notice any taste difference?

We had a potassium chloride whole house water softener installed in our then new home 11-years ago. I still found the taste of the water off-putting so I used a PUR pitcher for our drinking water needs including espresso. Having said that the KCl treated water is at least palatable whereas the NaCl treated water is pretty nasty to drink...at least the couple friend's systems I've sampled. We don't have terribly hard water to begin with...and it seemed to work fine for clothes, dishes and showers.

But the cost of KCl pellets is off the chart: ~$25-$30/bag now. The annual cost, for a whole house system, was killing me so I disconnected it earlier this year. Interestingly with just city chlorinated water at our taps the PUR cartridge filter lasts about 3X longer now than when the KCl was being used.

Thanks for your input spressomon. I've edited my post to say "espresso water softener". I don't have a whole house softener and was mainly interested in the affects on espresso taste. What were your experiences in that regard?

^ I got to thinking after I posted what you probably were driving at

All the water that runs through our Livia 90 and mypressi goes through a PUR counter pitcher. I can't comment how espresso flavor is effected with unduly hard or soft water. But we've been very, very happy with the simplicity of the PUR as well as its completely neutral water flavor. I should probably test strip the water from it one of these days though to get a baseline.