Hi,
can i have some help with understanding my water. I bought a Bezzera Domus Galatea one year ago and used a bwt bestmax premuim on 2 bypass for that year.
The other day i pulled off little filter on the hot water spout and saw grains of what i think is scale. so i popped out the mushroom and there is nothing on the mushroom but lots inside.


so i have bought a new bwt filter and have tested my water with api kit but dont understand all the numbers. i assume each drop is a degree.

My townwater is GH 8 drops, KH 9 drops
my old filter on 0 bypass GH 8 KH 5
new filter on 3 bypass GH 6 KH 4

changing the bypass doesn't change much, got it down to GH 5 on bypass 1

Do i have to worry about scale now with new filter ?
Did it scale because i left the old filter too long?

I appreciate your great forum. Thanks guys.

Chris

Christopherau wrote:Did it scale because i left the old filter too long?

Probably yes, your old filter was clearly exhausted -- note that it failed to reduce the GH at all. Normally when new they should tend to reduce GH and KH by about the same amount. At low bypass and low alkalinity they might tend to reduce GH more than KH.

Your new one appears to have reduced the hardness by only two drops and the alkalinity by five drops. That's unexpected for a typical buffered decarbonizing filter, but who knows what they put in those filters. If it's a bestmax premium the fresh filter may be dumping a little more magnesium than expected into the water.

Christopherau wrote:i assume each drop is a degree.

On the API kits look at the instructions. If it's like the ones here in the US, each drop corresponds to about 1 German degree, or 17.85 mg/L CaCO3 equivalent.

Christopherau wrote:Do i have to worry about scale now with new filter ?

Maybe, worth keeping an eye out. If it's a Bestmax Premium you don't know how much of that GH is magnesium or calcium, and it's the calcium that causes limescale. After your filter wears in a bit test it again to see if you get lower hardness. You can do a stretched sample with the API kit -- instead of a 5 ml sample find a container that holds 10 ml, then each drop corresponds to 8.9 mg/L CaCO3. The higher precision will help you detect when your filter is exhausted.

The instructions with your filter should give you a chart to help tell you how many liters of water it will treat before being exhausted.

Christopherau wrote:Hi,
can i have some help with understanding my water. I bought a Bezzera Domus Galatea one year ago and used a bwt bestmax premuim on 2 bypass for that year.
The other day i pulled off little filter on the hot water spout and saw grains of what i think is scale. so i popped out the mushroom and there is nothing on the mushroom but lots inside.

Did you buy it new or used? That's a heck of a lot of scale (if that's what it is) inside the grouphead. I note that there appears to be none inside the topside copper pipe. Could be the chrome plating has corroded away (high chloride?) as this has been associated with profuse scale accumulation on plated e61 mushrooms.

The machine was new. It is only one year old. I was surprised at the scale as I have used Bwt the whole time. I was also confused there was absolutely none on the mushroom either. But I do get some loose scale out of the hot water tap.

I am not an expert, but this looks more like corrosion to me. Maybe your water was too soft?

I'm no expert either, but it is raised lumps that feel gritty. Sandy deposits come out. Scale?

I will weigh in here that I tried 2 or 3 of their filters and was never able to get satisfactory results from titration tests, I spent considerable time talking to their engineer in europe and their subject expert here in the states and never came to any satisfactory resolution to my concerns and ultimately moved away from BWT and went with the Mavea Purity ST system and never looked back, I get very good results for GH and KH with the Mavea and measurable changes when changing the bypass %.

homeburrero wrote:Your new one appears to have reduced the hardness by only two drops and the alkalinity by five drops. That's unexpected for a typical buffered decarbonizing filter, but who knows what they put in those filters. If it's a bestmax premium the fresh filter may be dumping a little more magnesium than expected into the water.

I have retested after running aound 30l through it.

On bypass 3 GH is 5 deg and KH is 3.5

does that look better?

after some reading i have done a descale with citric acid, no scale fragments came out of tap after. and i have refilled boiler with very soft bottled water with GH of 1 deg (RO i think) then put my filtered water in the tank for making shots.

sluflyer06 wrote:I will weigh in here that I tried 2 or 3 of their filters and was never able to get satisfactory results from titration tests, I spent considerable time talking to their engineer in europe and their subject expert here in the states and never came to any satisfactory resolution to my concerns and ultimately moved away from BWT and went with the Mavea Purity ST system and never looked back, I get very good results for GH and KH with the Mavea and measurable changes when changing the bypass %.

So is that the Brita c150? is that doing a better job?

Photos for you.

We have scale still inside after 1 hour of descale soak with machine on
Mushroom was always clean but little difference to appearance of scale after descale
.

So I put stronger solution of citric acid directly in mushroom cavity for about one minute and it did that