How to ensure a long life for your expensive café equipment? Lever coffee makers, drip coffee makers and other café equipment need protection from incoming water from the line. But what will be a sufficient solution - softener, filtration, both?
How are water softener and water filtration different?
If you're wondering whether you need a water softener or water filtration, you already know about the importance of quality water for the taste of coffee and beyond. Hard water is literally dangerous to both the taste of coffee and the coffee maker itself. It compromises the way the coffee is extracted, destroys the coffee maker's components and reduces its life. Therefore, it is imperative to connect protective devices before water enters the coffee machine and other appliances. Such protection can be a water softener and filtration, but each technology has different results.
What is water filtration
The function of water filters is obvious from their name - they filter water of the ingredients you don't want to drink either in your coffee or just in a glass of water. Nor do you want sediments from the water to settle in your coffee maker, drip maker, kettle. A water filtration system can adjust the composition of the water both by filtering out unwanted things in the water and adding minerals such as magnesium to enhance the taste of coffee made from such water.
What is a water softener
From a technical point of view, softeners fall into the category of water filters. However, they are narrowly focused on reducing the hardness of water. Using salt and ion exchange resin , softeners capture the calcium and magnesium components of water. Softened water at the outlet means more efficient operation and longer life for the appliances involved. Softeners can also be purchased as cabinet softeners, i.e. compact and fully automatic equipment.
BWT Bestmax combines both filtration and water softening in a compact cartridge.
When to connect a cartridge water filtration system?
We recommend plugging in the cartridge water filtration whenever you have a coffee machine connected to the line. For home coffee makers, take this as an important recommendation if you want to enjoy your home coffee to the full and above all use your coffee maker for a long time. For professional coffee makers, water filtration is a must, without which you will not even get warranty service for defects caused by bad water.
Do you need a water softener for your coffee shop?
The requirement for installing a softener depends on the amount of equipment connected. As we have defined above, the job of the softener is only to minimize the hardness of the water without any other treatment. Chlorine particles or other constituents still remain in the water.
Cartridge filtration is essentially mandatory for a plugged-in coffee maker. However, you can plug in a water softener before it. This will provide a basic adjustment of the water hardness and thus reduce the wear on the cartridge filter. It simply pretreats the water.
Other appliances taking already softened water benefit from their advantages. For example, dishwashers, ice makers and other everyday cafe equipment. You will contribute to better efficiency, durability and lower consumption of all equipment connected to a water softener. A suitable cartridge filtration system is usually sufficient to connect purely the coffee machine, or the coffee machine and e.g. a tap with filtered water.
Summary
If you need to soften more than one appliance, for example a dishwasher, an ice machine, a coffee machine and a gastro appliance with a higher water flow, a cabinet softener is suitable. For a stand-alone coffee machine, BWT filtration is the best solution, as it contains both solids filtration and water softening agents (water with a maximum hardness of 3 DH should flow into the coffee machine). If you connect a flow meter in front of the filter, you can use the cartridge to its maximum and be sure of soft water. We also recommend connecting a pressure regulator to the coffee machine before filtration. You can find out how big a cartridge you need and how many litres it will last by using the water hardness test.
How long does a BWT cartridge last ? Depending on the size you choose. For a medium sized café choose cartridge size XL (we assume an average of 5000 litres of water / year), for smaller operations M-L may be sufficient. Very busy operations or operations with high water hardness then size 2XL. Here is a table showing the water hardness (dKH) and the resulting capacity by cartridge size.
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