Is my water ok?

Water analysis, treatment, and mineral recipes for optimum taste and equipment health.
silkypull
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#1: Post by silkypull »

i'm in S.SJ... well known for hard water. when we got our water softener at Sears, they tested our water and it was 28 hardness. so they set our kenmore elite hybrid softener to 28. then for our faucet water, we run it through a Watts Premier UF-3 stage filter.

so with a test strip and TDS meter, it measured out as:

TDS - 384 ppm
Water hardness strip: color match to 25ppm (1.5 gpg)

now as i try and figure out how to plumb in to make it as clean looking as possible, i'm wondering if this water is ok? i've been using filtered water for 5yrs in my BBE using reservoir, this will be my first lever with plumb in feature.

so is my water ok or would i need to get another filter to soften it up more?
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homeburrero
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#2: Post by homeburrero »

A hardness of 28 gpg (480 mg/L CaCO3 equivalent) would be very high, but possible in some parts of San Jose served primarily by groundwater (per https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/sjwa ... .pdf?q=ccr ).

Your softener appears to be removing the hardness to non-scaling levels, but to get a better handle on that you'd need to measure the hardness and alkalinity, as with a GH & KH drop titration kit.

It's probably OK. It likely has very high alkalinity that some would say might give you a dull flat taste in conventionally brewed coffee. (Espresso is far more tolerant of high alkalinity than regular brewed coffee.)

The San Jose water report indicates that it may be high in chloride. Chloride can be corrosive to espresso machines and the usual way of addressing that is to use an RO system and remineralize or blend back mineral from feedwater. If you have high alkalinity (which you almost surely do) you can be less worried about the chloride. Some recommendations about max chloride levels can be found here: Chloride - Recommended Acceptable Ranges
Pat
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silkypull (original poster)
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#3: Post by silkypull (original poster) »

thanks Pat. just ordered theGH & KH TEST KIT... will report in 2 day after amazon delivers. :)
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silkypull (original poster)
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#4: Post by silkypull (original poster) »

amazon still haven't delivered the test kit yet. however, i did reach out to our water company and got the following report that they've publish online.

https://www.greatoakswater.com/CCRs/2019ccr.pdf

in chatting with the person that does the testing, he mentioned our water is safe enough to drink straight from the tap. while i won't be doing that, but i'm wondering if either we should replace our Watts Premier UF3 system (it's been about 4yrs+ now). lately been seeing a lot of pop up on amazon and on google regarding Waterdrop systems, which is RO. but somehow this RO is 1:1 vs traditional 1gal = 4gal wasted. however, my understanding is RO water is bad for the machine unless you re-mineralize before going back into machine?

thoughts?
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homeburrero
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#5: Post by homeburrero »

silkypull wrote:i did reach out to our water company and got the following report that they've publish online. https://www.greatoakswater.com/CCRs/2019ccr.pdf
That's an excellent water report. Summarizing the key numbers important for espresso machine water:

Total hardness: 280 ppm CaCO3 equivalent (range 240-380)
Alkalinity: 204 ppm CaCO3 equivalent (range 180 - 300)
Calcium hardness: 123 ppm CaCO3 equivalent (range 95 - 178)
Chloride ion: 45 ppm (range 39 - 53)
Conductivity: 651 μS/cm (range 570-840) -- would read about 280 - 420 ppm on a typical inexpensive TDS meter

After going through your conventional water softener you will still have that 200+ ppm alkalinity. That level is higher than conventional ideal for coffee taste, maybe dulling the brightness of brewed coffee, but probably will taste fine in an espresso.

The big concern here is the 45 ppm chloride ion. That's borderline high by LaMarzocco recommendations and well above the very cautious Synesso recommendation of 15 ppm max. High chloride is a corrosion concern, especially if you have acidic or low alkalinity water. Since your alkalinity is high you have less reason to worry about that.

If you want more perfect water you'll need to go with RO that you remineralize. You can do that with a cartridge system, like in the Homemaster full contact (https://www.theperfectwater.com/Home-Ma ... ystem.html) that is discussed quite a bit in this forum. That would give you soft water - low hardness and low alkalinity, but fortunately near zero chloride.

A high end blended RO system could be used with this water to give you more mineral - you could dial the blend so that you have an alkalinity in the 50 ppm ballpark and nonscaling calcium hardness of 30-40 ppm (as CaCO3), and the chloride ion would be nicely down in the 10-15 ppm range.

RO does waste water, but systems with a permeate pump waste less, maybe 2 gallons used per gallon delivered.
Pat
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silkypull (original poster)
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#6: Post by silkypull (original poster) »

thank you Pat. that is super helpful. we use to have the RO from Watts Premier till there was cracks in the fitting that messed up our sub flooring. plus tank couldn't keep the pressure. it was left over by previous owner, so that was that.

the test kit will come tomorrow, so will be interesting to see what's the water quality coming out of my Watts UF-3stage.
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silkypull (original poster)
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#7: Post by silkypull (original poster) »

hi pat... the kit finally arrived and i had some time to test the water coming out of my Watts UF3 stage filter.

From tap water -> Kenmore Elite Hybrid Water Softener -> Watt Premier UF-3 stage filter
GH = 5
KH = 21

Tap water
GH = 19
KH = 19

Tap water -> Kenmore Elite Hybrid Water Softener
GH = 8
KH = 20

would this be safe water to use for my plumb in izzo alex leva?
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homeburrero
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#8: Post by homeburrero »

silkypull wrote:would this be safe water to use for my plumb in izzo alex leva?
Apologies with being so late in my reply. That's partly due to me being conflicted about how to respond.

My kindest and most straightforward response would be that this water will be just fine. You should not see high scale problems and it should be reasonably non-corrosive.

My most complete and honest response though would be to let you know that this water is less than ideal and if it were me I would consider using an RO system - primarily to get rid of the chloride ion but also to drop the alkalinity to more typically recommended levels. I would opt for something with a permeate pump and a calcite remineralizer unless I had big bucks to spend on a system that remineralizes using a blending valve. Because of the very high hardness in your tap water you would want to feed the RO with softened water.

Here's my thinking here:
You don't say which kit, or what units you are using, so I'll assume that it's the drop count on an API kit, where each drop corresponds to 17.8 ppm CaCO3 equivalents. So your final filtered GH came out around 90 ppm and KH about 350 ppm CaCO3 equiv, plus or minus about 20 ppm for the test accuracy. Based on the calcium ratio of your tap water you can assume that you have roughly 40 ppm calcium hardness. That is enough to give you an LSI in the 1.0 ballpark, which indicates that you might occasionally need to descale the machine.

The chloride ion (based on the water report) is borderline high at 45 ppm average and the only practical way of reducing that is to use an RO system. With your very high alkalinity and moderate calcium hardness it perhaps is not a corrosion concern, but for an expensive machine that you want to keep and use for many years why risk it.

The very high alkalinity combined with much lower hardness puts you in the "chalky, flat, thin" area of conventional water recommendation zones. Some would say that your coffee would taste better with less alkalinity. You can try some pourover brews using your tap water and also using Volvic or Crystal Geyser from one of the California sources. That may give you clearly improved taste, which argues for RO to get better water for pourover coffees. But for espresso the effect of alkalinity on taste would be far less noticeable.

By going with an RO system I would lose no sleep over the possibility of that borderline high chloride causing corrosion problems, and would also never need to descale the machine. If remineralizing with a simple calcite filter my water would come out on the soft side of typical ideals, roughly similar to what they get in Seattle, but that's fine for machine health as well as for taste. (The need for hardness minerals in extracting good taste is in my opinion overrated -- See this article for one well-done study that taste tested soft, medium, and hard water.)
Pat
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silkypull (original poster)
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#9: Post by silkypull (original poster) »

hi pat.. i chatted some more with our water company and they've mentioned over the 9yrs we've been living here, the water has improved a great deal. when we moved in the water hardness was 28, so Sear set the Kenmore Hybrid Water softener to 28 to match. but over the years we've never thought of adjusting it to match the incoming tap. so our water company suggested me to test and adjust the softener.

the drip test kit i use is the same one you've linked from API GH/KH kit. I tested our tap and GH was 19, so i adjusted the water hardness on our water softener to 19 and waited a week to do the test today.

interesting is GH went down, but KH went up. does temp have something to do with it as today is really hot.

Tap Water
GH = 19 drops
KH = 23 drops

Tap Water -> Softener (adjusted to match Tap @ 19) -> Sink
GH = 3 drops
KH = 23 drops

Tap -> Softener (adjusted to match Tap @ 19) -> Watts UF-3 filter
GH = 3 drops
KH = 23 drops
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homeburrero
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#10: Post by homeburrero »

That looks better - if you can adjust it then 3 drops ( 3 °dH) better than 5 drops - less potential for scale deposits.
silkypull wrote:interesting is GH went down, but KH went up.
The expectation with this type of softening is that the KH should stay the same before and after softening. Your original test that indicated a slight increase was probably just a measurement inaccuracy that you sometimes see in drop tests.
Pat
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