I just heard today that my Gaggia is totally fixed and upgraded and ready to come home.
Tomorrow I have the water people coming to bring a hard water feed over to where the Gaggia lives when it's at home. Yes you heard right, hard water. This is because I was previously using water straight from my domestic softened supply. Domestic water softeners use ion exchange resins to replace the calcium ions in the water with sodium ions, so for a long time I was making coffee with very dilute brine! Then the softener broke and flooded my Gaggia with salt, which helped break it. Scott (the commercial espresso engineer who sold me the machine) was always going to come over and fit a filter for me (I asked for one originally but he "forgot") but then as many of you know Scott lost the plot over just about everything from what I hear.
The hard water feed will then be run through a decalcification unit which doesn't use an ion exchange unit, and also allows a hard water feed into the softened output so that you can adjust the resulting hardness. This is the kind of softener used for commercial outlets. The benefits of this will be :
- No extra salt in my coffee or my espresso machine
- I can make espresso with water that is sufficiently hard to extract the right amount of flavour. Soft water doesn't work too well for coffee.
Hey maybe I'll get my geeks credentials back after all!