Super helpful, thank you - and apologies for my newbishness. I had no idea that building your own water was so simple!

This is what to expect from bad water, coupled with extreme negligence...

On the fence about descaling your espresso machine? See here...

would it be a safe assumption that i could achieve good scale free water by adding 300-400 mg of potassium or sodium bicarbonate to a gallon of distilled or purified water and use that? Also i read somewhere on these forums that crystal geyser is good to use wight from the bottle, does anyone have any experience with that?

Don't know about Crystal Geyser. I suppose you could get an analysis of what minerals are in it, from all the various sources they use, and make sure you get yours from the source that is least risky.

But 300 mg of Na bicarb, or 400 mg of K bicarb to a gallon of distilled water and you will not have scale or damage from chlorides. You will also not have to use those expensive filters in your BDB water tank. There is a simple particulate screen where you would attach the filter. That is all you need when you use your own safe water. Keep those filters in storage until/unless you decide to sell your BDB one day.

-Peter

pcrussell50 wrote:Don't know about Crystal Geyser. I suppose you could get an analysis of what minerals are in it, from all the various sources they use, and make sure you get yours from the source that is least risky.

You can get an up-to-date analysis for each source from their FAQ page, summarized below:

Individual Bottled Water Reports for each of our bottling plants are also available for download here:
Benton, TN
Johnstown, NY
Moultonborough, NH
Mount Shasta, CA
Norman, AR
Olancha Peak, CA
Salem, SC

Or look at this handy chart that Eric Svendson (erics) posted a few years ago:


Note the wide variety between the diffrent sources, with the NY source being very hard and scale prone, with undesirable chloride, and the NH source being soft and a little too low in alkalinity. The 2020 numbers are slightly different but close enough. The two California sources are often recommended for coffee water with the Weed/Mt Shasta source being a good one for non-scaling in an espresso machine. (Weed/Mt. Shasta has low calcium hardness and also a low total hardness (calcium and magnesium) of 26 - 39 mg/L CaCO3 equivalent.)

pcrussell50 wrote:But 300 mg of Na bicarb, or 400 mg of K bicarb to a gallon of distilled water and you will not have scale or damage from chlorides.

+1 on that. Those amounts will give you roughly 50 mg/L alkalinity in CaCO3 equivalents with zero hardness, zero chloride, zero sulfate.