Yes. Right now I think all pitcher filters include some WAC resins. At one time SOMA was simple charcoal, with no resins at all, but no longer.

A third way is to choose a bottled water, Volvic being one reasonable and popular choice. Be careful - there are recommendations out there for waters like Acqua Panna that are a bit hard and would require occasional descaling.

I neglected to mention a special case pitcher filter -- the ZeroWater filter. It has mixed bed resins (both anion and cation) that remove everything, giving you zero hardness, zero alkalinity, near zero everything. The water from these is slightly acidic (like distilled and RO) and is suitable for espresso machine use only if you add minerals to the water. For very high TDS water the filter capacity is small and they become uneconomical.

Not long ago I got the $25 basic version of the Zero Water pitcher as a backup to the RO water filling stations (or buying gallons of distilled). Now with COVID-19, the local water filling stations have been shut down and distilled water jugs are next to impossible to find. My local water TDS is approx 120 ppm, so it will be interesting to see how long the filter lasts. I'm thinking worst case it might come out to $1.00 a gallon, or approx. twice as much as the RO water filling stations.

My tap water TDS is around 250 and I used to use Zerowater as my source of deionized, but now use my grocery store's de-ionized refill station. My Zerowater filter gave me about 20 gallons, and my cost worked out to about $0.75 USD per gallon. My local store (Whole Foods) sells de-ionized refill for only $0.39 per gallon. They are still selling refill water during the crisis, but I have Zerowater around as a backup.

Uh-oh, I just stumpled upon this pitcher filter from BWT: https://www.bwt.com/en/water/magnesium- ... zed-water/

Quote: "The addition of magnesium balances the mineral content of the tap water, while calcium, extraneous particles and chlorine are filtered out. The result is an almost neutral pH, which is perceived by water gourmets as particularly soft and pleasant-​tasting."

Seems like I should try this out and measure the pH of the water it produces. It fits my Brita pitcher.

homeburrero wrote:I neglected to mention a special case pitcher filter -- the ZeroWater filter. It has mixed bed resins (both anion and cation) that remove everything, giving you zero hardness, zero alkalinity, near zero everything. The water from these is slightly acidic (like distilled and RO) and is suitable for espresso machine use only if you add minerals to the water. For very high TDS water the filter capacity is small and they become uneconomical.

Thanks for this.

I used to fill 3 to 5 gallon plastic water bottles for use in my water cooler from the Pure Water place across the street (Reverse Osmosis and add minerals for my brew water. picked up a ZeroWater pitcher as an alternative and unfortunately as I have 500 ppm tap water am blowing through filters at an alarming rate. I received my pitcher on March 30th and am looking at using a third filter today.

The water tester that came with the water pitcher broke (didn't survive my wife soaking the whole box including the instructions and test meter in bleach water) but I'm using my HM Digital COM-100 TDS meter on the 442 conversion factor instead which seems to work fine. Looks like the ZeroWater meter uses the NaCl conversion factor so I may switch my COM-100 meter to that instead going forward. I even have calibration packets for my meter. I'd picked it up to look at making TDS measurements on coffee, but decided that it works much better for just making TDS measurements on water instead.

I really wish I hadn't removed my filtered tap water connection at my kitchen sink using two 10" cartridges. I never had much luck with the water softener cartridge but I could use some good filtered water. Using my Robot I don't worry about scale, but I do worry for my BraZen brewer. I could easily switch to pour-over instead for the duration, except I get much better coffee out of my BraZen.

homeburrero wrote:My tap water TDS is around 250 and I used to use ZeroWater as my source of deionized, but now use my grocery store's de-ionized refill station. My Zerowater filter gave me about 20 gallons, and my cost worked out to about $0.75 USD per gallon. My local store (Whole Foods) sells de-ionized refill for only $0.39 per gallon. They are still selling refill water during the crisis, but I have Zerowater around as a backup.

That's good to know you got that much use out of a filter with that hardness; looks like I should be set for a bit. Seems the filters can be had for as little as $10 each if you buy enough ($15+ for singles). Would it be reasonable to assume I might get twice as much use out of my ZeroWater filters as you? If so, this could actually be cheaper than buying bulk water. FWIW I use an e-bike almost exclusively for shopping, and carrying a couple gallon jugs up the hill on the 1000' climb to my place is definitely noticeable.

Interesting that your local WF is still selling bulk water. I would think shutting down the water dispensers would be a chain-wide policy.


(Whole Foods in Mill Valley, Ca)

sorenwrang wrote:Uh-oh, I just stumpled upon this pitcher filter from BWT: https://www.bwt.com/en/water/magnesium- ... zed-water/

Quote: "The addition of magnesium balances the mineral content of the tap water, while calcium, extraneous particles and chlorine are filtered out. The result is an almost neutral pH, which is perceived by water gourmets as particularly soft and pleasant-​tasting."

Like almost all brochure descriptions, this one is a little over simplified. Many of the BWT products use a WAC resin, but have a patented version that has some of the resin exchanging magnesium rather than hydrogen. For details you can look at their patent. Also, like many other WAC cartridge filters, the new models often have some buffering capability so that they don't crank out low pH, low alkalinity water.

Just to make sure: Isn't it correct, that the BWT Magnesium cartridge filter is a better option than the Brita, because the BWT filter will soften the water just as well as the Brita filter, but also replace some of the calcium with magnesium instead of hydrogen, thus producing water with pH closer to neutral, compared to the Brita filter?

In other words: Isn't the water from the BWT better for my espresso machine because it's soft and relatively close to neutral pH (thus not building scale OR corroding the tubing etc), compared to the Brita which is also soft but slightly acidic?

RobindG wrote:I couldn't work it out, so I use Volvic now

That's what I did too until my machine started playing up 18 months later. After opening up the boiler, I found a surprising amount of scale. It cleaned up ok in the end but I don't use Volvic any more. I purchased a distiller and just add 0.1g of potassium bicarbonate per litre of distilled water. Super simple and it removes all worry of scale and corrosion.

Volvic isn't all it's cracked up to be. I used nothing but Volvic since the machine was brand new. Here's what it looked like inside 18 months later..