If my water is soft, do I need to do anything special?

#1: Post by **pontoon** » October 28th, 2019, 11:37 am

Using reservoir on a dual boiler machine. My tap water is rated 1-3 for hardness which I gather is good. Should I do anything to this water or just use it?

October 28th, 2019, 12:12 pm

Theres a bit more to it than that. Also you need to specify if your goal is optimum taste, OR, not having to descale. There is a little bit of tug of war there. Can you get a local water report? You want the following at min.

"Alkalinity"
"Hardness"
Breakdown of mag and calc
chlorides

October 28th, 2019, 1:21 pm

RyanJE wrote: Theres a bit more to it than that. Also you need to specify if your goal is optimum taste, OR, not having to descale. There is a little bit of tug of war there. Can you get a local water report? You want the following at min.

"Alkalinity"
"Hardness"
Breakdown of mag and calc
chlorides

I guess I'd like a balance between taste and scaling, perhaps erring on the side of low scaling if taste is not very noticeably affected. My sense of taste isn't the most refined.

- Alkalinity: 21-53 ppm
- Hardness 16-34 ppm (1-3 gpg)
- Magnesium 1-4 ppm
- Calcium 4-15 ppm
- Chloride 4-8 ppm

October 28th, 2019, 3:32 pm

You are fortunate that you water provides pretty much what you are looking for already. Just filter it with a fridge/faucet filter or brita type jug and should be fine.

For reference, my water is about 65PPM hardnesss and 40 alkalinity and just creates very light scale. You basically have the equivalent of "70/30 water"

October 28th, 2019, 3:38 pm

Awesome! Thanks so much

I literally spent an hour or two researching flowery and 5 gallon water jugs, plumbing, etc. It looks like I can relax and just make some coffee now.