I bought a BWT penguin filter pitcher for my tap water.
When I tested the hardness, it was HARDER than my already hard tap water, and the TDS went up too....
DId I do something wrong?
In my excitement and eagerness to get going, I used spring water from local store, the TDS was about 50, and the hardness was pretty low, not to soft either so I went with it.

I did not use the Penguin water, seems like it got worse?? Do those filters need a few cycles/refills or something?

How are you testing the hardness? This pitcher should reduce calcium hardness but adds magnesium which may be causing your measurements to increase.

Here's a thread about maybe a previous BWT pitcher. BWT water pitcher that states "Re the Mg++ replacement, that would have no effect at all on the total hardness or alkalinity (KH) measures. The best way you might try to see the effect of that would be to measure the Ca++ before and after filtration."

I use BWT in-tank pouches which use the same Mg++ replacement technology. When I first tried the pouch, I measured the water hardness with Hach test strips, and there was no difference between tap water and the in-tank water that was treated with the pouch. I then tried using an API GH & KH test kit. This measured my tap water GH at about 140ppm, and the water treated by BWT pouch at about 70ppm. I'm guessing that the test strips were confused by the Mg++.

You need to be sure you are testing your water appropriately before giving up on the pitcher.

stiksandstones wrote:I bought a BWT penguin filter pitcher for my tap water.
When I tested the hardness, it was HARDER than my already hard tap water, and the TDS went up too....
DId I do something wrong?
...
I did not use the Penguin water, seems like it got worse?? Do those filters need a few cycles/refills or something?

I think we have an idea and some data about how BWT's 'patented Mg technology' works (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20130306541.pdf). The WAC resin in that filter would be expected to greatly decrease the calcium hardness along with a lesser magnitude increase in the magnesium hardness, with a net decrease in the total hardness, and with a decrease in alkalinity approximately equal to the decrease in total hardness.

But this filter may also contain some sort of buffering that is there to help mitigate the acidifying effect of the WAC resin, and it's anybody's guess what that might be. It could even possibly contain magnesium oxide beads, which might tend to raise hardness, pH, TDS, and alkalinity especially on a new filter.

If you have done some hardness and/or alkalinity tests, please share with us your results and the type of test you used. As yakster said, the best way to evaluate these magnesium-loaded filters would be to test for calcium hardness, total hardness, and alkalinity, but getting a high precision calcium hardness measurement can be difficult.

In general I think it was wise of you to steer clear of any filter like this that is not well specified as to what it contains and how it performs.

Thanks all-I am testing TDS with one of those digital meter gauges, and hardness with hardness test strips.
I could definitely up my game of water testing, but, since it appears my local store spring water jugs test dramatically better, thats what im putting in my new machine-certainly beats the tap water I guess.
I will say the BWT pitcher water does taste better than tap...I was going to return it to WLL, but, wife likes the taste-plus not sure they'd even return something like this haha.
Cheers

I will say the TDS numbers are falling with a few refills, maybe the filter needed to cycle through a few rounds. My tap is still 225 ppm of TDS, not using it in my machine, but this pitcher has taken my tap from 400+ to ~225, so thats good. haha