Has anyone had any real luck with consistency regarding water reformulation?
I have argued with many industry water filtration/treatment companies that their mineral reformulation cartridges have serious flaws when coming to consistency of the water quality. Every discussion ends up with me essentially saying that the only way to have a truly consistent water quality numbers would be to have a large poly tank that has a homogenization ability (pump or stirrer). You would essentially fill the brew water tank with distilled water (not RO) then add a specific amount of the minerals you wish to add. When the tank is close to empty you would need to drain, flush and refill with a fresh batch of distilled water and start the process over again.
Does anyone get as nerdy as I do about water?
How do you reformulate? Do you use the method most cafes use with RO, which is blending filtered city water with your RO water (0-5tds PPM) to bring your mineral content average up?
The concentration of ions at the outlet of a the cartridge will likely vary with ambient temperature and residence time (a function of flowrate and size/shape). I’d say it’s a pretty unavoidable aspect of the design. I suspect it may also vary over the life of the unit.
You could probably go some way to overcoming this by bumping up the concentration and then mixing in water from the RO downstream of the remineraliser. Would add significant complexity, and thus potentially more to go wrong.
A few possible alternatives that might work:
install a buffer tank between the remineraliser and your machine. If large enough, it will allow mixing of “under-spec” and “over-spec” water, effectively “smoothing out the bumps”.
replace the remineraliser with a pre-mixed liquid “concentrate” tank and a dosing pump (like these which mixes the concentrate into the water at a defined ratio.
I imagine these kind of systems are commercially available?