Is the water where you are hard? Is it soft? Does this question even make sense to you?
Don’t worry, it will shortly!!
Hard water refers to water with a significant amount of dissolved mineral content, such as calcium and magnesium. Soft water, inversely, has very little dissolved minerality, and may be higher in salts. You can test this with a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) meter, or the easiest way to know is this - do you have a kettle? Does your kettle get a build up of pale yellow/white “stuff” in the bottom, or potentially a ring of it at the high water level?
You, my friend, have Hard Water.
Here where we are in Calgary, AB, water is notoriously hard. You can feel the effects in the shower or when you wash your hands, or you can feel the change when you travel somewhere with soft water. The reason this matters is that the scale buildup we may see in a kettle from all those minerals precipitating out affects our pipes and water systems, specifically our Espresso pipes and water systems. Scale can build up in your boiler and water lines and cause clogging and damage to your espresso machine.
The easiest way to deal with this is preemptively. With a passive softener like an Oscar 90 or BWT BestSave or other in-tank filter, the filter sits in your water tank and passively pulls minerality from the water before it can get to your waterlines and boiler. You could decide you’d like a plumbed in machine, in which case see our blog on How To Plumb In for details on filters and how to link it all up. You may go so far as to install a reverse osmosis water filter to your house, or only fill your water tank with purchased distilled water! This I actually don’t recommend, partially because if water is too soft, it can be slightly acidic and cause the slow breakdown of the insides of the metal of your machine. The other reason is that some calcium and magnesium actually helps make coffee taste better. If you have or want a reverse osmosis system anyway though, it is totally possible to add those minerals back in after! Generally this is done using Epsom salt and baking soda. (If you have very soft water where you live, you may want to look into water recipes themselves just for fun, and to see how adjusting water minerality can change the way your coffee tastes.)
So, does using a water softener mean I never need to descale my machine??
Of course not, sorry buddy!
You just won’t need to descale quite as often. If you’re using softened water, I find twice a year to be plenty as far as descaling goes. The basis of descaling is mixing up an acidic solution, any brand of descaler specific for coffee machines will do, and running it through your machines’ water system to dissolve scale build up that made it past your water softener. Then, run one to two clean tanks of water to ensure you don’t get accidentally very acidic coffee ;)
Next time - What is backflushing??
Stay tuned!
