Nice job - - I see you figured out how to use a 10 ml sample to double the API kit precision. Your values can be thought of as ± 9 ppm CaCO3 equivalent.

Although the 125 mg/L GH is high enough to be scale prone, you are measuring hardness minerals that may be sequestered by that Novo H2O, and it's not certain to what extent that would prevent scale buildup in an espresso boiler. if you go that route you can watch for scale and only descale if you see some buildup.

Yes and the 125 reading is on the drinking water tap in our ADU, the 26.85 reading is from the ESP 124 filter feeding the espresso machine so for now will leave that go and see what happens over time

Dave at HiTech espresso, who suggested the ESP filter, has been using the 3M 124s for years in his own home and machine and he says 0 corrosion and 0 scale with what must be city water very close to what I have, he's only 3 miles from me

Ok so 3 months into the 3m esp 124 and the Nuvo h20 thingy on the water supply into the house and we're at total hardness level of 50 per the test strips, I gave up on the aquarium drop kits due to laziness but will watch this one after 6-7 weeks

I noticed light scaling in our steam oven which shows deposits, so I swapped out a new 124 cartridge which was a breeze and bled the filler a bit to get the charcoal out and am back to 0 total hardness per the strip

Water tastes better with the minor hardness in it, but I'll blow through this filter and then look into one of the 3Ms that let me blend the filter water with some tap

We have used this cartridge to feed a water spout and all drinking and cooking water for 3 months for $38 so not bad

apple2k wrote:Ok so 3 months into the 3m esp 124 and the Nuvo h20 thingy on the water supply into the house and we're at total hardness level of 50 per the test strips, I gave up on the aquarium drop kits due to laziness but will watch this one after 6-7 weeks

....

Greetings from South OC Peter!
I'm interested in learning a bit more about your installation, especially the Nuvo h20 thingy Which one is installed and does it service the whole house while the 3M system is more localized to maybe the kitchen only?
I'm not sure if you mentioned it, but did you say what the effect of the Nuvo system has on the GH/KH prior to the 3M esp 124?

I'll probably post a query here eventually as I also have hard water where I'm at and would like to reduce / minimize it without having to do a whole house water softener system that uses salt or RO.

Your system sounds like something I'd like to do as it appears to work for the whole house (maybe not in an optimum manner) with another filter system more localized that makes it more optimum.

Yes the Nuvo H20 softens water for whole home, via citric solution not traditional softening system. It dropped the water from 250 hardness to 125, see post #10 above for the #s. A new ESP 124 removes that 125 of hardness and gets it to 0.

We have the medium size Nuvo system, can't recall name, but it is not the biggest one but we have small house with 2 people in it not a mansion.

I have the ESP 124 going into both the water tap in our kitchen sink and the espresso machine

After 3 months of pretty heavy use - mostly for drinking water and cooking, the ESP was letting in 50.

apple2k wrote:After 3 months of pretty heavy use - mostly for tap water and cooking, the ESP was letting in 50.

That is an indication that it's time to replace the filter. The ESP124-T brochure says it has a softening capacity of 1100 grains. At an GH of 250 mg/l (14.6 gpg) it would be exhausted at around 75 gallons, and would go twice that at a GH of 125 mg/L.

apple2k wrote: ... but I'll blow through this filter and then look into one of the 3Ms that let me blend the filter water with some tap

I think most, and perhaps all of those 3M filters that support a bypass are WAC (decarbonizing) filters* that exchange H+ ions for hardness ions, unlike your ESP124 conventional SAC resin softener that exchanges Na+ ions for hardness ions. WAC (decarbonizing) filters drop the alkalinity and tend to acidify the water, which can make them inadvisable where you have high chloride ion in the water.



* The spec on the SGP124BN-T (https://www.aquapurefilters.com/shop/pr ... 24bn-t.pdf) explicitly says it's a weak acid cation exchange: " A high capacity weak acid ion-exchange resin reduces calcium and magnesium ions to help prevent hard scale formation ...".

Yep your right the scalegard line will not work for that reason

Found a study on the Nuvo system, I can't figure out how to upload a PDF but you can access it here:

https://nuvoh2o.com/proven-results-inde ... -verified/