Got an ECM with rotary pump and love it. Quiet as. Had the Technika lV which for no good reason l upgraded to the Synchronika. Both beautiful and highly functional.

 

Im planning to plumb the l1 in i think mines fine, but could some one confirm? Im going to prob run it through an hma at the very least

View attachment 54503 View attachment 54504

 

@Rob1It does not allow me to enter any values, do I need to send an edit request?

 

I cant edit on my phone. May have to use pc

 

You have to copy or save the file to a new one on your drive. You can't edit the original for obvious reasons.

 

Thanks, downloaded.

So where do I get the target alkalinity values from, google?

 

I've been able to get into my account and edit out the mistakes I made on the second page. I've always wondered if people who save a copy to their drive get the updates. Can anyone confirm?

 

I've always wondered if people who save a copy to their drive get the updates. Can anyone confirm?

Not sure @Rob1. I saved a copy on my one drive weeks ago. This is the second page, which I have.

 

@numb15 yes, I guess you could replace the brita jug with a zero jug, I use a distiller to get pure water to remineralise but you can cut tap water too as described. I doubt either of your filters will bring the water down to a low enough hardness and alkalinity but a GH/KH test kit will let you check...

Also I checked Thames Water and the values you need for the spreadsheet are provided in their report (alkalinity as caco3 and hardness as caco3 are listed) but is based on samples from 2019 so not great. I don't know how a zero jug filter works but the only way I know of getting rid of chlorides is distillation, and according to the report you've got over 50mg/l chloride, also nitrate and sulphate and other stuff but I don't know how these are dealt with by RO or the zero filter. If you try to use a salt softener sodium will go through the roof as it's already at 36mg/l. Basically my point is just cutting your tap water with a filtered water with no hardness/alkalinity but still with chlorides and other stuff is not ideal. Filters are really not my thing, they all claim to work in different ways and do different things and I don't really know anything about them beyond that vague concept.

You could try mixing filtered water down to a suitable alkalinity with a zero jug and check to see if the hardness is low enough to prevent scaling too. Filtered might be better than tap water for this, just tap water alone and the hardness is still going to be high enough to get scaling at an alkalinity of about 40-50mg/l but maybe filtering can bring the hardness down a bit without decreasing the alkalinity as much. You'd be bringing the sodium down too but you'd have to calculate what it gets down to approximately, and just hope you aren't sensitive to the taste of the stuff that has made it through the filter and hope that it won't damage the machine with long term use.

EDIT: Wait this is for brewing? As in not an espresso machine?

 

@numb15 yes, I guess you could replace the brita jug with a zero jug, I use a distiller to get pure water to remineralise but you can cut tap water too as described. I doubt either of your filters will bring the water down to a low enough hardness and alkalinity but a GH/KH test kit will let you check...

Also I checked Thames Water and the values you need for the spreadsheet are provided in their report (alkalinity as caco3 and hardness as caco3 are listed) but is based on samples from 2019 so not great. I don't know how a zero jug filter works but the only way I know of getting rid of chlorides is distillation, and according to the report you've got over 50mg/l chloride, also nitrate and sulphate and other stuff but I don't know how these are dealt with by RO or the zero filter. If you try to use a salt softener sodium will go through the roof as it's already at 36mg/l. Basically my point is just cutting your tap water with a filtered water with no hardness/alkalinity but still with chlorides and other stuff is not ideal. Filters are really not my thing, they all claim to work in different ways and do different things and I don't really know anything about them beyond that vague concept.

You could try mixing filtered water down to a suitable alkalinity with a zero jug and check to see if the hardness is low enough to prevent scaling too. Filtered might be better than tap water for this, just tap water alone and the hardness is still going to be high enough to get scaling at an alkalinity of about 40-50mg/l but maybe filtering can bring the hardness down a bit without decreasing the alkalinity as much. You'd be bringing the sodium down too but you'd have to calculate what it gets down to approximately, and just hope you aren't sensitive to the taste of the stuff that has made it through the filter and hope that it won't damage the machine with long term use.

EDIT: Wait this is for brewing? As in not an espresso machine?

Thanks, a lot to digest there, will try the kit first as suggested. It is for an espresso machine but I may want to try filter or French press too down the line

 

For use outside of an espresso machine I really think the only thing to concern yourself with is alkalinity, although you may be be sensitive to other things in the water. For espresso machines with 316 or 316l steel boilers I'd avoid chloride completely, I think La Marzocco still recommend a max limit of 30mg/l in brass/copper boilers. I may be OTT when it comes to this. I found when I was using Magnesium sulphate and Calcium chloride to remineralise water I'd get bad tastes above about 20-30mg/l for Sulphate and Chloride alone but I forget which was which. Your mileage may vary with regards to tolerating it for taste or even noticing it, same for sodium.

 

My water is too soft to check but I wondered about something recently. What would happen to hardness if water was boiled in a pressure cooker.. We also no longer have one.

 

You'll be able to check the water with a titration kit, if it asks for a 5ml sample and 1 drop = 14mg/l or something then with a 20ml sample 1 drop = 3.5mg/l, so you can always test your water you just need to increase your sample volume until you get the resolution down to the point you're able to draw the line somewhere. It depends on the temp you reach but assuming you do get to the point scale starts to form then hardness and alkalinity will be reduced equally until scale stops forming. You can use the following equation from Jim Schulman's FAQ to calculate the mg/l scale that will form but you need to define the hardness, alkalinity and temperature.

The calculation doesn't have a closed form solution. If you have a programming language, write an iterative subroutine to solve this equation for x, the milligram amount of scale per liter throughput, for any H, A, & T you want: 0.9*log(H - x) + 2.465*log(A - x) = 39.61 - 13.12*log(T + 273) or log(H - x) + 2.365*log(A - x) = 39.61 - 13.12*log(T + 273)

...unfortunately I couldn't find a way of integrating this into the spreadsheet. To be honest I didn't look into it I just assumed there wouldn't be a way without linking to an external program or something. I might have a go with Python one day and see if I can get something working.

 

It seems to be an imponderable. Comments suggest hardness must reduce as temperature increases and pressure cookers can reach 120C, maybe more. Dissolved gasses will be driven off and I suspect that includes C02.

It needs a pressure cooker and test kits really including pH.

In some ways it goes back to something my dad mentioned when I tasted some water that had been boiled. Way too long ago for me to remember correctly or why it cropped up. I may have even tasted it due to that.

There is also the temporary and permanent hardness aspect. When I asked Severn Trent about what they actually measured I didn't get a clear answer suggesting it's total. I suspect permanent if it should be called that relates to temperature as well.

 

It seems to be an imponderable. Comments suggest hardness must reduce as temperature increases and pressure cookers can reach 120C, maybe more. Dissolved gasses will be driven off and I suspect that includes C02.

It needs a pressure cooker and test kits really including pH.

In some ways it goes back to something my dad mentioned when I tasted some water that had been boiled. Way too long ago for me to remember correctly or why it cropped up. I may have even tasted it due to that.

There is also the temporary and permanent hardness aspect. When I asked Severn Trent about what they actually measured I didn't get a clear answer suggesting it's total. I suspect permanent if it should be called that relates to temperature as well.

Permanent hardness is GH/Total hardness...the Ca & Mg as CaCO3.

Temporary hardness is KH/alkalinity/bicarbonate as mg/L*0.82. You want about 50mg/L as CaCO3.

Most water suppliers list both in their full reports.

pH should be 7 +/-1.

This has all been widely discussed for 20yrs with respect to espresso boilers & far from imponderable.

 

Hardness will only reduce as temperature increases if scale forms. The water I use doesn't form scale even heated to 125c. It's not really useful to define temporary and permanent sources e.g. sources of hardness from sulphate and chloride that won't scale alone unless the water only contains sources of such 'permanent' hardness and no alkalinity from carbonate sources. You can make water like this with Magnesium and Calcium sulphate/chloride and Calcium Citrate for alkalinity, this is what is in the third wave water sachets. If you have a mix of sources of hardness including carbonate sources, and you just keep heating the water under pressure, once the alkalinity drops to 0 no more scale will form and there will be some hardness left behind that was associated with chloride and sulphate unless there are sources of carbonate that don't also contribute to hardness such as Sodium bicarbonate. Equally hardness could drop to zero and leave alkalinity remaining, it depends if the initial hardness exceeds alkalinity or vice versa. Alkalinity from carbonate sources and total hardness define scaling potential together, they need to remain in balance; if alkalinity is high and hardness is low you can get scale and vice versa.

I don't think you ever have to worry about exceeding solubility of 'permanent' sources in water, but it is possible for calcium sulphate scale to form at high concentrations which I saw at room temperature in a concentrate I made that combined magnesium sulphate and calcium chloride. But this was at concentrations a few thousand times more than you'd get in drinking water. One solubility is exceeded 'permanent' hardness has to precipitate too, but Calcium chloride has a solubility of 745g/l at 20c and as temperature increases solubility increases so it's not a concern in that sense.

 

As far as I know tap water will always be alkaline. Maybe with the increased use of plastic mains that is not needed now but it appears to be due to chlorine which is added for other reasons.

Hardness here is always stated as 47ppm. Ph varies. 64 reading in the last 2 months have a max of 8.62 and a min of 7.42. The high will have been when work was done on the system some were. It happens at odd times and I can smell it as it comes out of the tap. Uk limits allow Ph to drop to 6.5.

Scaling in kettles over several years of use is more or less none existent. When I bought an espresso machine I noticed an extremely light film in a couple of places that descaler found rather hard to remove. The deposits were not even easy to see. I wondered about using the kettle as an indication of when to descale. Wasn't workable.

My SDB. Pass as a refurb and it arrived with more scale in it than a single descale cycle could remove. In fact a recent descale appears to have remove yet more suggesting the descale cycle is winning slowly.

Pressure cooker. Unfortunately we don't have one.

 

Some help please interpreting the output from the speadsheet?

Info taken from my water suppliers website.

Typical water hardness: Mod. Soft

Hardness clarke: 4.90

Parameter	Min	Average	Max	Units
Alkalinity as CaCO3	17.3	26	37.5	mg/l
Calcium	15.4	22.7	43.8	mg Ca/l
Chloride	5.21	<9.84	<56.8	mg Cl/l
Hardness Total as CaCO3	46	70	136	mg CaCO3/l
Magnesium	1.95	3.21	6.51	mg Mg/l

Hydrogen ion (pH)

6.74

7

7.66

pH value

I will be plumbing in my new machine when it arrives next week (no tank so must be plumbed in) and need to know what, if any, kind of filtration system i will need to keep it running correctly for as long as possible (de-scaling it is aparantly a proper headache) and also to give me some good tasting shots.

I have entered the figures for Alkalinity and hardness as CaCO3(using the average values) into the spreadsheet and it calculates

New Langelier Index:

-0.3510365556

The info box next to it says a positive number indicates scaling potential; A negative number indicates corrosion potential. But I have no idea of the range/scale of this given value to indicate how bad or good a problem you have either way.

-0.351 in my mind is a very small negative value - does this mean i have a very low risk of corrosion and no risk at all of scaling? Or where this calculation is concerned is it a big negative number? and it would need to be say -0.00351 to be small??

Would 0.00 be the ideal value - no corrosion no scaling? would the coffee tast good with this ?

Adding in the popular BWT Bestmax inline filter that most seem to use, would look to reduce the hardness further, this seems like a bad idea to me. Do I need to put one in that increases the hardness slightly (if there is such a thing) or would i get away with nothing ?

Open to any suggestions , Thanks

 

-0.3 - +0.3 is considered balanced. Above/below is increasingly scale forming or increasingly corrosive, so you're just out of range. It changes with temperature so you can only aim for a range.

For taste (ymmv) I would want to increase alkalinity to about 40mg/l but doing so at the same hardness will result in scaling at that temp. Unfortunately I know nothing about filters to help you with that side of things so best email customer services with your specific goal to see what options they have, I imagine there will be something.

 

While waiting for my espresso machine, I would like to test the GH/KH in my remineralised Osmio Zero, which will go into my machine. The KH/GH turns to relevant colours after a drop or two on a 5 ml sample.

To get some accuracy, I test on 20 ml of water on a cup. The question is what is an acceptable colour change? Is it a light green one, not so light green. green, dark green in the case of GH? The same in the case of KH. Should we take that reading as soon as the colour changes or should we keep adding drops until ….? This is important as it will make a difference to the level of alkalinity in the Osmio Zero water.

Please see an image below; I may be tempted to stop as soon as the colour changes. In the the case of GH, it may be 3 or 4 drops, giving an yield of 13.425 ppm or 17.85 ppm CaCO3.

Thanks !

 

While waiting for my espresso machine, I would like to test the GH/KH in my remineralised Osmio Zero, which will go into my machine. The KH/GH turns to relevant colours after a drop or two on a 5 ml sample.

To get some accuracy, I test on 20 ml of water on a cup. The question is what is an acceptable colour change? Is it a light green one, not so light green. green, dark green in the case of GH? The same in the case of KH. Should we take that reading as soon as the colour changes or should we keep adding drops until ….? This is important as it will make a difference to the level of alkalinity in the Osmio Zero water.

Please see an image below; I may be tempted to stop as soon as the colour changes. In the the case of GH, it may be 3 or 4 drops, giving an yield of 13.425 ppm or 17.85 ppm CaCO3.

Thanks !

View attachment 58260

It's as soon as the colour changes. Can't remember what it is now. Orange to green for one test, blue to yellow for another?

Either way it should be tinted one colour from the first drop and then it'll be x drops until the tint changes.....if it doesn't change colour and just turns green from the first drop then that's off the scale.

 

Great calc, thanks for sharing