I have been looking into a water softening system for my ECM Giotto. In the meantime I decided to just use volvic bottled water in the machine. Recently I wanted to test my home water as well as the Volvic bottled water.

From the strip it looks like my tap water was 120PPM
When I tested the Volvic from a bottle it came in just lower at 80-100 from the color on the strip. Does that make sense ..I thought the Volvic bottled water would not cause scale so I am assuming the hardness in PPM should be very low...
Am I mistaken or is there more to the Volvic waters makeup that makes it low or non scaling. I have skimmed through Jim Schulman's Insanely Long Water FAQ but if anyone can help me out that would be great...

Thanks

You might do just as well mixing your tap with some distilled water. I use 2 parts distilled to 1 part tap to yield a hardness of about 45 ppm or so.

When I wrote the FAQ, Volvic was quoting around 75 mg/L hardness. As Scott says, there are less expensive solutions.

Doesn't volvic have other minerals which can also affect not including Calcium ?? I mean it is Mineral Water.

I too have thought it might be a solution. My tap water is 179 and am thinking about using Brita for softening

I recently found some water hardness test strips on clearance at Wal-Mart for $5.00 so I bought a set. According to the test strip the Ozarka bottled water that I'm using from Moffit Springs is 50ppm - just about perfect from what I've read. This is not nearly as expensive as Volvic and comes in 1 gallon bottles at my grocery store for about a dollar per gallon. I encourage you to look at and possibly test the one-gallon offerings at your local supermarket. You might be surprised at both the good taste and the hardness level.

brad