Do you do anything for treating NYC water?

My current recipe is to always leave the water running for at least 1 minute (to minimize pipe rust) and I use 3/4 purified water with Zerowater filter and 1/4 from the tap. I use a La Marzocco Linea Mini.

--mike

Diluting with zerowater is good for reducing the variable (12-101 mg/L, averaging 20 mg/L) chloride ion in NYC water **. But that water is already soft and low in alkalinity, so if it were me, I would add 100 mg of potassium bicarbonate per liter of Zerowater to make it into rpavlis water. Then I would try using that straight. You could try mixing that with 25% tapwater and use that if it's a taste improvement.

One recent discussion related to NYC water can be found here: Water Test Help

A carbon + particulates filter is always a good idea if you are using tap water. Especially in NYC it seems that people report a lot of sediment from the plumbing and delivery systems.



** from 2018 water report: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloa ... report.pdf

I tried 2 more formulas:
1. just a SOMA filter
2. ZeroWater, plus third wave water.

Both of these the an improvement over my first formula. ZeroWater+third wave water seems to do the best. All I do is to put enough third wave water minerals so that I get 90-150 total hardness. I'm pretty happy with this solution.

I do wonder, if I change the flow restrictor on the Linea Mini from .8 to .6, like the commercial machines, will this third wave water solution clog the machine?

thanks,

--mike

Katran wrote:I do wonder, if I change the flow restrictor on the Linea Mini from .8 to .6, like the commercial machines, will this third wave water solution clog the machine?

TWW (espresso formula) has low enough calcium and bicarbonate, so should be scale free and unlikely to clog your gicleur, whether you use 0.8mm or 0.6mm.

Do stick with the TWW espresso formula. Not because of scale but more because the classic lacks alkalinity and has some chloride ion, which could be a corrosion concern.

P.S.
The espresso formula that Taylor Minor shared with us a while back would have a bicarbonate alkalinity of 20 mg/L CaCO3 equivalent and a calcium hardness of ~ 45 mg/L CaCO3 equivalent. If you plug that into a Langelier Saturation Index calculation at (hot) boiler temp = 135℃ and pHeq = 6.5 you get an LSI of about -0.7, indicating that limescale should tend to dissolve rather than deposit.