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Also, ro isn't always consistent. You'll have to mix in native water to the ro water to have any mineral content. As this is not stable, your brewing water will vary. Plus, efficiency is an issue, RO wastes water, increasing your bill, I certainly wouldn't use it for a dishwasher, a std salt softener recharged weekly is more than good enough.
Matisse-
Thanks for the reply. The remineralisation systems use a cartridge which adds (I think) bicarb and magnesium to the near 0 TDS RO water to get it close to the 90TDS specified by the SCAA so it is stable, even tunable. The minerals come from the cartridge rather than mixing untreated water in.
I've always used cartridge filter systems and found that they reduce the bad tastes and aromas seemingly by a percentage, so if the water board have fixed a leaking main upstream and done a chlorine purge, it tastes chloriney, just less so than the tap water. This is not the case with RO. I have also torn down espresso machines which have always used cartridge filters and they still get destroyed, just takes a bit longer.
The other thing is I will gain an advantage in flavour over other shops not using RO. I'm going to be roasting in the shop and building a brand so the coffee quality needs to be an order of magnitude above the rest. I'm using Marco SP9s for consistent pourovers because everyone else pours them by hand, gets distracted and fucks them up. Every time. The competition are using decent roasteries and have well trained staff but they don't have deep technical knowledge of tasting so they don't tend to get the fine attention to detail stuff like water and absolute consistency in methods.
So the long and the short is that i want the water to taste consistent, it's the biggest problem i have with brewing coffee here.
Stevethecoffee
Ah good, thanks both.
I'm opening my own shop, all being well- the lease is being sorted out at the moment. I want to install a RO system so that I get consistent water quality, plus it'll be my little secret weapon - none of the other shops in the town understand the need for it.
So there are 6 stage systems with remineralisation ranging from £110 on ebay up to £2.5k for systems like the BWT and La Marzocco which look like they have been designed by Apple.
So I reckon if I sell 100 drinks in a day and that is 60 espresso shots at approx 70ml a time (including rinse flush and water retention in the ground coffee), 20 Americanos at 250ml and 20 filter coffees at 500ml per time.
The glasswasher is stated at 2.2l per cycle and I would expect to run it about 5 times per day.
That's roughly 35l per day.
The cheap ebay systems are rated at 340l/day but I'm told realistically you should expect less than half of that - so if I had a 40l tank which would fill overnight, plus the system will still be generating at least 6l/hour during service, I should be right, right?
I don't expect that this conclusion is correct, but I want to know what £2.5k gets you over the £110 system.
Cheers