Hi All,

I recently upgraded to a Linea Mini and am a bit paranoid about the water I'm going to put into it. I mainly want to determine if I am okay using my tap water to run the machine, and what (if any) filtration I should be doing; for the moment I'm just using Poland Springs bottled water until I get this figured out.

I'm in South Burlington, VT (USA) and the water quality report for my town is at https://cms6.revize.com/revize/southbur ... 202022.pdf. As far as I can tell, I'm well within the acceptable La Marzocco ranges for everything except hardness, which is at 65 ppm (so 5 under the acceptable range of 70-100). I also use a Brita filter to remove any extra chlorine the town adds.

I also used the water test kit that shipped with the mini, and the results seemed fine (running tests on the water from the Brita pitcher).

Here is a screenshot of most of the most relevant results from the above pdf (column on the right are the numbers after treatment as far as I can tell):



I've been using this town water for a few years with my Profitec Pro 600 with no noticeable issues, but that machine also didn't come with lots of large warnings about voiding the warranty due to bad water (like the mini did).

I think I'm fine to be using the tap water + Brita, but just looking for confirmation on my interpretation on all these numbers (which I am in no way an expert on). Any feedback you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Paul

paul_in_vermont wrote:As far as I can tell, I'm well within the acceptable La Marzocco ranges for everything except hardness, which is at 65 ppm (so 5 under the acceptable range of 70-100).

I would not let that bother me. That LM water spec recommends unusually high hardness for some reason. Water that meets that spec will need careful attention to scale accumulation and periodic descaling.


Your water looks good in terms of hardness and alkalinity, although it may tend to deposit light scale. The chloride ion, at 19 ppm, is not ideal (any chloride may be corrosive) but is probably OK given the good alkalinity. You can use a simple charcoal and particulates filter, but keep an eye out for scale. If you wanted reliably scale-free water then you could consider a conventional (sodium exchange) softening cartridge. I would not recommend any of the popular decarbonizing filters (BWT premium, Everpure Claris, Mavea Quell, etc) because you want to keep that alkalinity to help mitigate the chloride corrosion risk.

Thanks Pat!