I have a quick question, i've been buying spring water from the grocery store and its been turning out rather well its not very economical. My question is I just bought a PUR water 3 stage water filter and I was wondering if anyone has used it. I am unable to find anything about my local water profile and the department of water here SUCKS bad and wont tell me anything about the profile. Does anyone have any sugesstions as to what is the best water to use for the price?
PUR Water Filter
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homebrewer_99
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I've been using the faucet PUR filter for years now without any problems.
Water composition spec sheets can requested from your utility co.
Water composition spec sheets can requested from your utility co.
Cheesefood
Well-Known Member
rj_hockey said:
You can do your own ROI analysis and look into whether a Reverse Osmosis (R/O) system would be feasable over buying water. For about $150 you can get a whole-house set up.
If you call the water company, explain why you need a water analysis, and politely ask to speak to one of their chemists, you will probably get what you want.
If they still won't give you the information, you can get an analysis from http://www.wardlab.com (test W6) for $16.50, and then try billing the water company for your costs.
-a.
If they still won't give you the information, you can get an analysis from http://www.wardlab.com (test W6) for $16.50, and then try billing the water company for your costs.
-a.
Mikeus
Well-Known Member
I've been using the PUR for 6 months and the beer has been great. Still, it might be different with what's in your local water.
your local gov't is required to provide that info. it's amazing what just 30 seconds with google can produce.
city of toledo water report
city of toledo water report
SenorWanderer said:
That's an amazingly vague report - I didn't even see Total Hardness or anything.
The PUR filter doesn't strip dissolved minerals, so if Toledo's water tastes bad because of mineral content, it won't do very much to help. I've brewed with groundwater over 600 ppm of total hardness (similar to Burton-on-Trent's water), and it makes fine Burton-style ales, but for everything else, I had to buy RO water.
I would do a blind study - take some water from the filter and some that bypassed the filter and try to tell the difference without knowing which is which. If the filter makes a demonstrable difference, use the water for brewing; otherwise, buy RO water or have an RO system installed for your house, then make your mineral content as desired with brewing salts.
cheezydemon
Well-Known Member
My GOD. I posted a thread saying that garden hoses could introduce lead into your beer. People were actually pissed at me, calling me an alarmist. It is good to see a thread where people actually care about their water chemistry.
Reverend JC
2500 gallons year to date
cheezydemon said:
I would not call you an alarmist, but i had to thaw my hoses so i could hook them up to the CFC last weekend. So i filled the bathtub up with hot water and put the garden hoses in there. When they thawe I worked the water out of them so it would get all over the house as i took them outside. The crap that came out of the hoses was astonishing. And to think i drink from them in the summer sometimes while outside. No more!
Some kind of crazy sediment crap. nothing i want in my beer either.
Thanks for the help, I hate to waste 20 dollars trying out the water here, I actually prefer Toledo water to any other City i've lived in. There is no bad taste at all.
I think i'll just give it a shot after all everythings learning in this hobby =).
I think i'll just give it a shot after all everythings learning in this hobby =).
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I wonder if any of the people who criticized you have ever drank out of a garden hose. It taste like, well...a GARDEN HOSE!cheezydemon said:
I used to use my under-sink PUR filter, but it took a long time to collect enough water, and I burned through the pricey filters very quickly. Now that I've moved the "brewery" to my back patio, I'm loving these inexpensive RV filters, in conjunction with a $5.00 drinking water hose. Now I can fill my kettle in seconds, and the water tastes great.
TastePURE RV & Marine Filter
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abracadabra
Well-Known Member
cheezydemon said:
Cheezy
It sounds like you focused too much on all the naysayers.
There were a number of people Lars and myself included that though and said much in support of your post.
I was looking at some of my newer hoses last w/e and everyone of them said "NOT FOR DRINKING WATER" on the grip next to the faucet connector except for the hoses I bought specifically for drinking water.
There's always going to be people that don't care about the health of themselves or others that may drink their beer. Don't let a bunch of naysayers get to you. You'll never know how many people your post may have helped.
I was hauling gal. jugs of filter watered outside and wondered if I just let the water run thur my hose if it might taste OK. Like Lars no matter how long the water ran it still tasted like "GARDEN HOSE" I wouldn't use nasty tasting water in my beer even if there was no potential risk. But you know just like some people can't see well, some folks can't hear thunder. Some people don't have much of a sense of taste either.
Like anything when you deal with the general public you'll have to deal with a certain amount of A$$ Holes. There are also a bunch of really helpful and nice folks here too.
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OTOH, as somebody who has invested heavily in Procter & Gamble, I wholeheartedly encourage everybody to burn through as many of those expensive under-sink PUR filters as possible! Maybe Santa will bring me a stock-split this year! 
I was able to find the water quality reports for Edmonton in about 5 seconds. They are a bit confusing, so I'll take them to work and have one of my techs explain them to me. Here's the link for the interested:
Edmonton Water Reports
Edmonton Water Reports
Johnnyhitch1
Well-Known Member
HA...just came inside from drinking some hose water after watering the plants....man the picture that poping my head of your murky bathtub
*shivers*thx!!
great thread for R/O / PUR discussion. Just bought a tap filter to alleviate my "carbon footprint" (right....) with all those poland spring bottles. Neighbors think i have a drinking problem(!) with the 10-20 crushed bottles a week i carry out of my house.
Thx again for the idea
Double-R
Well-Known Member
Its the mother of all "Resurrections"..
But, Johnnyhitch1 your from NY.. are you on well water..
You mentioned "poland spring bottles" are buying??
NY tap water is some of the best around.
But, Johnnyhitch1 your from NY.. are you on well water..
You mentioned "poland spring bottles" are buying??
NY tap water is some of the best around.
Johnnyhitch1
Well-Known Member
would you like me to open a new thread?
im interested in information pertaining to this topic. thank you for your input, i can read dates...
good to know, just got into water analysis and haven't been able to get a report from local municipality yet. ill look more into it and in the mean time brew 2 identical gallon sized recipes and use filtered tap and bottled water in the other. thx again!
carlisle_bob
Well-Known Member
Hi
Talk about an old thread - yikes!! Would have been better to start a new one.
I'd vote for an RO system over any of the other stuff. The new (since 2007) zero waste versions are pretty cheap and they will get rid of the bulk of the hardness. That's the biggie for most water systems. Around here the "spring water" tests out the same as city water. Both are hard, but not Burton on the Trent hard.
Bob
Talk about an old thread - yikes!! Would have been better to start a new one.
I'd vote for an RO system over any of the other stuff. The new (since 2007) zero waste versions are pretty cheap and they will get rid of the bulk of the hardness. That's the biggie for most water systems. Around here the "spring water" tests out the same as city water. Both are hard, but not Burton on the Trent hard.
Bob
WheeledGoat
DisMember
I have to wholeheartedly disagree w/ the "if the tap water tastes good, brew with it" idea. At one point, I had that mentality, and it nearly cost me the hobby! I drink my tap water all the time (Chicago, Lake Michigan) and it tastes great to me. So, I used it when I got into brewing. With one exception (a farmhouse ale), all of my beers had a weird off flavor!
Hindsight being 20/20, it's easy to look back and point at my water... but since it tastes fine for drinking, I was looking at all the other common factors. I spend hundred of dollars and many wasted batches before I tried using bottled water and VOILA! That was my demon.
When you're already spending $25-50 for a 5-gallon batch, buying your water for ~$1/gallon = another $6 is really nothing IMO.
One last thought to leave you with: I've moved to doing all grain batches, but I still go for extract batches when the recipe calls for it, or I just want to enjoy the convenience. My way of thinking is this: DME or LME is dehydrated wort, made from water that already had a water profile including minerals, trace elements, etc... so when I'm reconstituting DME/LME, I use distilled water. When I'm doing all grain, I buy "spring" or "drinking" water.
good luck!
Hindsight being 20/20, it's easy to look back and point at my water... but since it tastes fine for drinking, I was looking at all the other common factors. I spend hundred of dollars and many wasted batches before I tried using bottled water and VOILA! That was my demon.
When you're already spending $25-50 for a 5-gallon batch, buying your water for ~$1/gallon = another $6 is really nothing IMO.
One last thought to leave you with: I've moved to doing all grain batches, but I still go for extract batches when the recipe calls for it, or I just want to enjoy the convenience. My way of thinking is this: DME or LME is dehydrated wort, made from water that already had a water profile including minerals, trace elements, etc... so when I'm reconstituting DME/LME, I use distilled water. When I'm doing all grain, I buy "spring" or "drinking" water.
good luck!
Ramitt
Well-Known Member
Your problem is likely chloramine in the water, inexpensive campden tablets will fix that. I had the same problem, had several dumped batches.
WheeledGoat
DisMember
reeeeeeeeeeeeeealy! hmmm. i suppose i could google this but i'll ask you too: does chloramine dissipate given time like chlorine does?
carlisle_bob
Well-Known Member
Hi
Since we're going over things pretty much from scratch...
Hard water is best addressed with something like an RO system. You grab the "chunks" and throw they away in the waste water. Trying to tie them up with another chemical isn't a real good idea. If you are on a municipal water system you very likely have hard water. They make it that way to protect their pipes.
Organics can either be adressed by pulling them out (like with carbon) or by nuking them with another chemical. If you go the nuke route you do have the combined chemical still present, but it's volume is generaly pretty low. Other than water purification chemicals and additives (flouride) there shouldn't be much organic stuff in municipal water.
Distilled water (unless you did it your self) often is nothing of the sort. Generaly it's RO water of (unknown) purity. If you are lucky it's RO water that then went through a resin bed to clean it up further. All of this (distilation, RO, resin beds) is fine for the minerals. Not so great for orgaincs. For example ethanol is quite happy to pass through a still ... burp ...
If you have well water or your own bubbling spring, then indeed you will have to get things checked. There's no easy way to know what a water source like that produces.
One easy measure of crud in water is conductivity. The more minerals in it, the better it conducts electricity. Salt water makes a pretty good conductor. Your city water is maybe 10K ohms. Water from an RO system should be up in the 50K to 100K range. With a resin bed after the RO you can get over 10 megaohms. You can indeed have enough organics (or biologicals) in the water at 10 meg to kill you, but at least there aren't any minerals..
If you take a beaker of 15 megaohm water and put it out on the table. I'll drop to under 1/2 that in a matter of minutes. Disolved CO2 increases the conductivity. I would not worry much about disolved CO2 from normal air impacting my brewing. You can go to far with any one mesurement.
So much fun...
One neat side effect of *really* clean water - it strips the mineral deposits out of your coffee pot. Of course it also will disolve stainless steel (at a *very* slow rate).
Bob
Since we're going over things pretty much from scratch...
Hard water is best addressed with something like an RO system. You grab the "chunks" and throw they away in the waste water. Trying to tie them up with another chemical isn't a real good idea. If you are on a municipal water system you very likely have hard water. They make it that way to protect their pipes.
Organics can either be adressed by pulling them out (like with carbon) or by nuking them with another chemical. If you go the nuke route you do have the combined chemical still present, but it's volume is generaly pretty low. Other than water purification chemicals and additives (flouride) there shouldn't be much organic stuff in municipal water.
Distilled water (unless you did it your self) often is nothing of the sort. Generaly it's RO water of (unknown) purity. If you are lucky it's RO water that then went through a resin bed to clean it up further. All of this (distilation, RO, resin beds) is fine for the minerals. Not so great for orgaincs. For example ethanol is quite happy to pass through a still ... burp ...
If you have well water or your own bubbling spring, then indeed you will have to get things checked. There's no easy way to know what a water source like that produces.
One easy measure of crud in water is conductivity. The more minerals in it, the better it conducts electricity. Salt water makes a pretty good conductor. Your city water is maybe 10K ohms. Water from an RO system should be up in the 50K to 100K range. With a resin bed after the RO you can get over 10 megaohms. You can indeed have enough organics (or biologicals) in the water at 10 meg to kill you, but at least there aren't any minerals..
If you take a beaker of 15 megaohm water and put it out on the table. I'll drop to under 1/2 that in a matter of minutes. Disolved CO2 increases the conductivity. I would not worry much about disolved CO2 from normal air impacting my brewing. You can go to far with any one mesurement.
So much fun...
One neat side effect of *really* clean water - it strips the mineral deposits out of your coffee pot. Of course it also will disolve stainless steel (at a *very* slow rate).
Bob
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