NeilP said:
I have had various of those types of machines in the past, but they never last so long. Hard water area and the need to de-scale them all the time..boilers nearly always give up, or the steam / water pipes clog.
I always use bottled water with a ph above 7. I actually drink from a spring below the reservoir. Similar ph but the finer particles form more of a sludge that washes away, than a shale that sets solid. I have looked at the analysis of both, and they are about the same. Mine is slow filtered picking up natural deposits though, . The tap water carries more surface contaminates and has nasty additives. Some just to steralise the pond water, some for mass medication.
You can buy 2l of table water for 17p in the big supermarkets on the mainland. That is thought to be tap water run through an r.o filter then sorted out with some appropriate salts for taste. Unless you go to sainsburys as they appear to be selling the waste from the r.o machine, not the product.
Avoid water with a ph below 7. It would be illegal from your tap, but comes in bottles. It is acidic water than leaches from it's suroundings, giving all bottled water a bad name. Water is one of our few alkaline intakes, and if I drink acidic water for a couple of days I know about it. Urine Ph drops and I get a bad head as my blood ph gets silly. Thus I won't drink water sourced from soft areas such as scotland or the west country. Even washing in that can cause skin conditions such as exma(even my spell check can't resolve that one) to flare up.
If your water is very hard, your brew simply is not right. You can forget the rest, just think about your brew. If your going out of your way to make a nice drink, you want water that can be used as a solvent. Hard water is pretty used up, and carries impurities. Ph neutral water is often thought to taste sweet compared to acidic or alkaline water. Good water is nice and will let your coffee beans release the flavour they should do.
If I want to drink yorkshire tea and have it taste like yorkshire tea, I have to buy the hard water variety made to target areas like mine. If I want my washing as clean, I must use 50% more detergent. It is 100 miles away and we both think our water is right. We are both wrong and can't produce a coffee that tastes like it was intended, without using the same water as it is the main ingredient. Not the coffee.
Lots of people use table top filter jugs. They don't lower salt content. They have carbon to lock up some stuff, but also some white granular stuff for ion exchange. They make water taste better, but it is not that much cleaner. It won't make a proper brew. It will reduce the taste of chlorine products in the water for a few days though. If you can actually taste them. Which is unlikely if you drink tap water all day long, It will just seem normal. Most people only notice it occasionally when there mains are flushed following works. If you stop drinking it, even having a shower can be unpleasant. Water additives stink. Once on bottled water you could never go back. People just don't realise what they are being fed.
Just far too long.... far far too long. But no time to trim it.... 'post'