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Temporary hardness (TH) water test kit,
I have two questions about the the temporary hardness (TH) water test kit.
1) The written instructions say to add drops until the test water turns "deep blue". In fact, it turns what I would call light blue first, and then only many drops later – too many to be right for Volvic water – does it become a deep blue. Should I go by the transformation of the grey/red colour to light blue?
2) The instructions in the Londinium Store say "Each drop corresponds to 17.1mg/L of total hardness". Should "total hardness" read "temporary hardness"? (In fact, the written instructions say to multiply each drop by 20, which I assume that is just an approximation, to determine "hardness" - no mention whether temporary or permanent.)
Thanks,
Matt
1) The written instructions say to add drops until the test water turns "deep blue". In fact, it turns what I would call light blue first, and then only many drops later – too many to be right for Volvic water – does it become a deep blue. Should I go by the transformation of the grey/red colour to light blue?
2) The instructions in the Londinium Store say "Each drop corresponds to 17.1mg/L of total hardness". Should "total hardness" read "temporary hardness"? (In fact, the written instructions say to multiply each drop by 20, which I assume that is just an approximation, to determine "hardness" - no mention whether temporary or permanent.)
Thanks,
Matt
Comments
1. Shake the bottle of reagent for 10 seconds before you start. Jiggle the test container gently after you add each drop of reagent, screw the lid back on each time if necessary - this will solve that issue I believe. Colour change may vary depending on what is in your water but I would expect it to change from a shade of pink to a shade of blue. Take care to ensure a precise 10mL of water is used. Given that you are in central London your hardness might be around 300mg/L, so it is going to take a few drops to produce a colour change. If you are testing volvic you will get a colour change at 4 or 5 drops
2. I'll correct that error now if that's what it says, but 1 grain per gallon equals 17.1mg/L. The test is for the total of magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate, and ferrous or ferric or whatever the iron carbonate is called (your water will be brown if it is present, which is unlikely)
Kind regards
Reiss
What I'm trying to determine is if the Brita jug with the Maxtra filter will reduce the temporary hardnss of London mains water sufficiently to allow me to switch over from Volvic
Best wishes
Matt
Volvic - 3 drops to light blue, 4 drops to dark blue: temp hardness 51.3 - 68.4 mg/L [it seems best to give it as a range]
Brita (75%) - 4 drops to light blue, 5 drops to dark blue: temp hardness 68.4 - 85.5 mg/L
NB: The Brita jug has a meter on the lid that reads from 100% effective, on down, from insertion of a new filter. I'll measure it again at 50% and again at 25%. For now, it looks like I'll be sticking with Volvic.
Matt
It's actually a timer, measuring off about one month. It's up to the user to decide when to replace the filter. One household with hard water may use a lot of water from the jug, another may be just one person filling his espresso machine with it and then the filter lasts longer of course.
It's actually a timer, measuring off about one month. It's up to the user to decide when to replace the filter. One household with hard water may use a lot of water from the jug, another may be just one person filling his espresso machine with it and then the filter lasts longer of course.
That's true of my previous ("Classic") Brita jug. The new one ("Elemaris") makes the following claim:
The BRITA Elemaris jug combines modern design with advanced technology to deliver optimum quality reassurance: only this Premium model offers the intelligent BRITA Meter which uses three different ways (volume of water, water hardness and time) to determine when the filter cartridge needs replacing and ensuring you enjoy great tasting BRITA filtered water every time.
http://www.brita.co.uk/brita/en-gb/cms/elemaris-water-filter.grid
How it works in practice, I can't say,
Matt
I had these same questions with that hardness kit and it is why I opted to use this kit and others, including digital meters, and take an average.
I had these same questions with that hardness kit and it is why I opted to use this kit and others, including digital meters, and take an average.
Further to Stephen's comment, I have a Hach kit and Reiss's "Advanced Kit" which he gave me to try, and they are both consistent with one another. I have no doubt as to their accuracy or their value in the context that Matt is using his.
Water is probably the least thought of, most important component of a good cup of coffee, and it is well worth the effort to get it right. And boy do we have a mountain to climb in London.
Very impressed, my local water is known to be very hard & that turned blue at 10 drops, it started to turn at 9 drops and 10 straight to blue.
The filtered water did not go to the deep pink of the 'tap' water and at 3 drops started to turn at 4 was pale blue and deeper at 5
So the 3M has dropped the hardness of my water from 170 to around 75 so pleased with that
I had bough one of the electric TDS meters from eBay... it measured the same samples of water at 245 / 240 so that was a complete waste of time for trying to test hardness!
*Edit*
Just read this which would explain the above!
Hi Simon,
TDS meters are extremely good as long as they are used in the proper context, as of course are the reagent tests. If you take a look at the Hach website, you will see that there are many different reagents to test for different agents in the water that you wish to test... So you can test for lead, or magnesium, or calcium, or general hardness... which is the one that I am referring to above... Reiss's Advanced test, is testing for general hardness too, which is why it gives the same result as the equivalent Hach test.
I use TDS meters (in context)... I have a 'reverse osmosis" system, which removes almost every solid from a given sample of water. In practice my water is generally measuring between 0 and 10 parts per million, usually nearer to 0. I use a TDS meter to confirm this (TDS means Total Dissolved Solids). I then pass that water through a bed of 50/50 magnesium/calcium salts and measure the result with a TDS meter, the result, is extremely accurate it always concurs with the Hach/Advanced tests, and it usually measures somewhere between 60ish and 80ish parts per million... And because the water contained 0 (or thereabouts) parts per million of dissolved solids before it was passed through this bed...
I know that what I am measuring... is hardness.
So a TDS meter is as good as a Hach test, is as good as an Advanced test, if you know what you have in the first place.
I firmly believe, through bitter experience, that if you have bad water, as in London, then the best method is to strip it bare and then start from there.
My experience is derived from spending nearly £300 on a Claris "Everpure" system and valve head, which barely did anything to London water.
I agree that RO is definatly the way to go and I'm sure at some point in the future its the direction I'll go also - especially as I've a copy of Maxwell's 'water for coffee' on the way to me to read!!!
I wanted to get the L1-P 'up & running' and protected against hard scale, all the RO systems I've seen seem to require a LOT of space which might be hard to find in my kitchen! At least now I can take my time and have a look around at whats out there!
Cheers
Simon
Hi Simon,
I aimed to get my water to measure around the same "ballpark" figures as set out by the SCAA in their little PDF... Which is a single page digest of their much longer and much more expensive water manual.
This is not rocketry, but it is analogue, which is notoriously difficult to get right and then once right... Keep on track.
I believe that Maxwell spends quite a lot of time talking about buffers... And using bicarbonate as a buffer to keep the hardness stable.
As I understand things, that is what I inadvertently did by combining magnesium with calcium... bicarbonate being a mixture of two carbonates (I think?).
Anyway, the point being, that when Reiss and myself were just using calcium alone, we could not get anywhere near the kind of salt levels that I achieved with the 50/50 combination.
I wrote about this in the very early days of this forum....
http://londiniumespresso.com/forum/permanent-file/30-plumbed-in-what-about-water-quality#170
regards
Stephen.
Will go and read up now!
Cheers
Simon