I recently solved a problem I was experiencing on my Breville Dual Boiler that turned out to be caused by hard water. I had been descaling with a vinegar solution. Turns out that's not good enough and a good descale with a proper descaling solution solved my trouble.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to do with my water situation. I don't mind descaling from time to time, but I'm overwhelmed with the water options and discussions out there and am not a chemist and do not aspire to become one. At all.

One thing that I came across was Jim Schulman's Insanely Long Water FAQ where he says this:

I personally think home machine users are better served using neutral or harder water and preventively descaling. At home use levels, the 5 gram scale accumulation criterion will only require monthly to quarterly descaling, and the coffee taste will be at its best whenever the water is at 90/50 or above, since the machine will reduce it to that level by heating it. Whether or not to soften the water down to this level depends on how hard the tap water is; if the water is very hard, descaling could become a weekly chore, and such a partial softening could be preferable.

There's several ways to do this. The conceptually simplest is to boil the water for a few minutes; this removes hardness in excess of coffee levels.

That's an appealing solution to me and I'd be fine with doing that long term. I'm pleased with how things taste currently and don't really want to mess around with my water too much. Is there any real reason why I couldn't just boil water for a few mins, let it cool and then go with that?

The simplest solution would be to mix your tap water with distilled to lower the TDS/hardness.

Mixing tap water with distilled water

I'd prefer not to be bothered with needing to supply distilled water. Will boiling treat my water well enough? I'm in Edmonton: https://www.epcor.com/products-services ... ality.aspx

Boiling it would make it worse, mixing with DI water would work much better.

Boiling it would make it worse

While this is a true statement, because escaping water vapor results in an increase in the TDS of the remaining water, it is a bit misleading. Before water softeners became very common, softening by boiling was a widespread practice. The trick is in how it is done; you can't just boil and get softer water. You boil the water, then let it cool. Minerals will precipitate out of the solution, leaving a (usually) white deposit on the bottom of the pot. You then have to scoop off the water without disturbing the deposit.

Having lived in Prince Albert SK during my youth, I can appreciate the problem of the OP (same river source). I can think of several possible solutions. First and easiest is to buy an ion exchange cartridge and fit it to the pickup tube in your water reservoir. These need to be recharged regularly with salt. Similar devices can be bought to fit onto kitchen faucets...a bit handier if you also want soft water for tea. Our water in PA was hard enough that we eventually put in a whole house softener. Here in the South Okanagan we have hard water (about the same as yours). We put in a whole house water softener. But I we don't care for the taste of the water (it's still high in TDS, just that the usual mineral ions have been exchanged for sodium ions, which does not scale). So, downstream of it we put in a standard under-counter RO unit. We plumbed the RO to the kitchen, bathrooms and the coffee bar. We added a needle valve so that we can adjust the TDS (we keep it at about 25 ppm). We never have scaling problems on any of our kettles or our espresso machine.

An easy fix for questionable tap water is bottled drinking water.