Greetings!

Long time lurker, but not a frequent poster. I just acquired an ECM Synchronika (upgraded, or lets say switched, from a Micro Casa A Leva). I am hoping to plumb-in the new machine and getting a bit overwhemed with the complexity of info out there on water treatment.
I was looking at Bwt or Mavea filters, but one of the common issues I see concerns the alkalinity levels which can be too low after filtering. From the water report below I seem to be at around 90ml/g in average. Would that cause an issue with a Bwt or Mavea system? How just a softener and carbon filter (if so, any recommendations?)?

Alkalinity: 90 mg/l
Hardness: 167 (measured with the Zero Warer TDS meter)
Chlorides: 26 mg/l

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Until I figure my water filtering strategy ill probably just continue with straight Zero water in the reservoir.

Water profile (from 2016 but its as recent as I can get)
https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal ... NTREAL.PDF

tasseloff19 wrote:From the water report below I seem to be at around 90ml/g in average. Would that cause an issue with a Bwt or Mavea system? How just a softener and carbon filter (if so, any recommendations?)?

Your alkalinity, hardness, and chloride numbers are at a point where you're probably OK with a WAC resin decarbonizing filter like BWT bestmax, Mavea, Claris, etc.* You would want to dial it in so that your alkalinity is consistently above 40 mg/L, which should give you a total hardness above around 80 and a calcium hardness above around 50. Maybe less with a Bestmax Premium that shifts some calcium hardness to magnesium. You'd need to watch for scale but expect a need to descale rarely if ever.

But if it were me I'd play it safe and use a conventional softener + charcoal. Your alkalinity would stay up in the 90 mg/L neighborhood, which would be good for corrosion protection (important in the face of that 27 mg/L average chloride) and should also taste fine, especially for espresso. The calcium hardness would drop low enough that you shouldn't see any scale.

P.S.

tasseloff19 wrote:Hardness: 167 (measured with the Zero Warer TDS meter)

Conductivity 'TDS meters' measure conductivity as a rough measure of total dissolved solids, not hardness, altho you can generally assume that your total hardness will not be much higher than your TDS measure. Using the numbers from this Montreal 2016 repoort that you linked, your averages would be:
alkalinity = 90 mg/L CaCO3 equiv
total hardness = 119 mg/L CaCO3 equiv
calcium hardness = 77 mg/L CaCO3 equiv (calculated from calcium ion)
chloride ion = 27 mg/L
bicarbonate ion = 110 mg/L (calculated from alkalinity)



* Here's some technical discussion about chloride and decarbonizing (WAC) resins: /downloads/ ... pdated.pdf . The summary of that article, which is focused on chloride and sulfate corrosivity for stainless steel and not necessarily espresso machines in general, which may be more vulnerable to chloride because of copper and brass components, says:

Claris (like other WAC products) is great for water with bicarbonate levels above 100 & low chloride and sulfate levels less than 80ppm and 150ppm respectively.

Thank you for your help, really appreciated!

If I go with a standard softener system, something like this combo should work?:

https://www.amazon.ca/Pentek-10-Inch-St ... 56&sr=8-17
And

https://www.amazon.ca/Pentek-EPM-10-Car ... er&sr=1-20
Or
https://www.amazon.ca/Pentek-Carbon-Fil ... er&sr=1-27

And

https://www.amazon.ca/Pentek-WS-10-Soft ... B002711V44

tasseloff19 wrote:If I go with a standard softener system, something like this combo should work?:

Yes, that would be a very practical and cost effective option. Either carbon filter is fine and that 750 grain softener would treat about 100 gallons of your 120 mg/L ( ~ 7 gpg) total hardness water.

Perfect, ill never use 100gal only for coffee, but I may use some of it to brew beer!

Thanks again, ill try to post back once i've installed everything!