Cloudy water with lots of 'stuff' floating in suspension...

borat123

I just got back home from a few weeks holidays and fired up the old lever. After warming up I pulled a shot and noticed a bad case of dandruff on the top side of the puck as I emptied into the knock box... wtf ??? ???

The shot still tasted great but I was a bit worried where all the light coloured dots were coming from.

So I filled a glass with hot water straight out of the head and it was cloudy as hell, and doesn't dissipate. Looking more closely it kind of looks like soup full of little floaty bits.. yumm There is no smell though and the water tastes normal.

The funny thing is, if I let the machine cool down and drain some water from the boiler it's crystal clear.

I did do a filter change just prior, so I'm wondering if that had anything to do with it(?) The machine has always run through a commercial filter (Everpure BH2), fed by desal water which I believe is made with an RO process.

Anyway I'll do a descale and we'll see how it cleans up.

Anyone else seen symptoms like this?

cosmic_couple22

No good borat123, Hmmm, did you flush a few litres through the new filter before reconnecting to your machine? Hope that's not a silly question. Chester

borat123

Yep, about 20 litres - they're charcoal based filters so would expect black rather than white. I usually get a little black residue when changing them. So, I took the cover off and found the fibre / paper based boiler gasket looking a lot worse for wear, with one spot an obvious leak. The element gasket (another fibre one) is also in need of a change. I used fibre based gasket to ensure a good seal, which it did. But, unfortunately they have crap longevity. I'm got some spares which I'll fix it with now but will order a set of teflon ones. The fibre ones look like they should be an annual job :o as they obviously don't stand up to the job very well.. Anyway it's now descaling so after a few hours I'll open the boiler up and take a peek inside Interested to see how much scale its accumulated with the filter setup I have.

cosmic_couple22

Is your water hard there ?

borat123

Nope, it should be soft but low in mineral content after the desal. I can't remember what the PH was last time I tested it. Here's a few pics of tonight's upcoming job... The boiler gasket is so brittle and dry you can actually snap the edges of it off.

Koffee_Kosmo

My first thought was milk taint but your answer put that thought out as a cause Next would be some sort of super fine sediment that can pass through the filter that accumulates and has dislodged Could also be sealer or gasket degradation Must do research on delaminates water on water storage ?

cosmic_couple22

oh yeah thats a problem, shouldn't be to much trouble with scale though if your water is quite soft . Happy tinkering

borat123

Boiler out, and element out after a 1hr descale at operating temp with a 2.5% citric acid solution. Hardly any scale at all; I think the weak citric acid cleaned up the little bit that was there. I noticed that at each point where the gasket failed, there is some electrolysis going on between the stainless bolts, the aluminium rings and/or the flange bit of the boiler. 4x of the boiler bolts around the rings are stuck solid (and I'm not sacrificing the rings this time to get em off...), so they're soaking till tomorrow with a nice dose of WD40. A PITA really considering it's only been three years since the resto. The stainless boiler flange bolts need somehow to be electrically isolated from the aluminium rings. Maybe some plumbers tape over the thread and a plastic washer at either end(?)

borat123

The WD40 was doing squat so with some strategic application of strong citric acid around the bolts I managed to get the boiler split into two, without any cutting, and the rings intact. I still have three bolts seized into the alu rings though. Some more acid might loosen them up. I'm thinking now when I put it back together I'll just liberally coat all the boiler bolts with molykote which hopefully will stop em from sticking next time.

derrilex

How about a sleeve on the bolt threads in addition to anti sieze. Maybe some heat shrink ? Maybe apply some anti sieze, then heat shrink, shrink it down then another layer of anti sieze. You will no doubt have some stray milliamps somewhere which is all it takes when you have water and dissimilar metals

QM0996

You will find that any time you have dissimilar metals etc something is going to happen... And when you have Ally , SS , Copper etc along with water = interesting outcomes. IN addition if your using RO water and not re mineralising you will generate even more issues as the RO water will want to return to a balances state and thus leach every thing it can from every thing it comes in contact with... QM

borat123 wrote:

The WD40 was doing squat so with some strategic application of strong citric acid around the bolts I managed to get the boiler split into two, without any cutting, and the rings intact. I still have three bolts seized into the alu rings though. Some more acid might loosen them up. I'm thinking now when I put it back together I'll just liberally coat all the boiler bolts with molykote which hopefully will stop em from sticking next time.

derrilex

Hungry, hungry RO water

borat123

Today I finally got the rings off the base of the boiler after cutting the last two remaining bolts... I then spent the rest of the morning scraping off old gasket, then tidying up the face with the dremel, and lastly with fine sand paper (remind me never to use paper gaskets again😉 After that I gave the boiler lid another dip in citric acid to clean up the residue on the outside that was left behind from the leaking gaskets. Thankfully it still polished up the same as it was before. New Teflon boiler and element gaskets ordered, and a clean up / re-polish of the bottom half of the boiler tomorrow. I was digging around in some boxes and found a spare set of rings I bought last time when doing the original resto, so will use those and bin the pair with the bolts stuck in them. I also found a couple more new boiler bolts I had left over from last time to replace the cut ones.

derrilex

Ooooh, sexy and shiny

Lacehim

QM0996 wrote:

You will find that any time you have dissimilar metals etc something is going to happen... And when you have Ally , SS , Copper etc along with water = interesting outcomes. IN addition if your using RO water and not re mineralising you will generate even more issues as the RO water will want to return to a balances state and thus leach every thing it can from every thing it comes in contact with... QM

Who mentioned RO water? ??? I thought Borat123 was using filtered tap water which only does is a scale and taste & odour filter. From memory he's based in Dubai which uses desalinated water.

borat123

I was told that the desal water over here is made with an RO process... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0958211812701982 20ltr bottled water that I drink at home has a TDS around 130. The tap water that no one drinks unfiltered is near 200ppm. Tap water via a BH2 everpure filter is what's plumbed into the Urania. Sand and bacterial crap is the main reason for the filter.

borat123

Ok, so the boiler is nice and clean and after hours of re polishing by hand it's close to back to where it was when first polished. I'm so pissed off with the short life of the paper based gaskets I'm going through the entire machine and replacing them all with Teflon... Here's some pics of shiny stuff:

Brett_H

Sorry to hear about the short life-span of those gaskets mate. Still, the bonus for us is more pics of that machine. Awe-inspiring!

borat123

So the plan now is for a teflon boiler gasket, and also looking at teflon washers on both ends of the boiler bolts, teflon plumbers tape wrapped around the body of the bolts, and hand cutting some teflon shims (from 0.8mm sheet) to sit between the boiler flange and the alu rings. I'm thinking that should stop any conductivity across the aluminium -> stainless -> copper... The main offender seems to be the alu rings so another option may be to have some custom made in brass, but I think the Teflon option may be cheaper / simpler. Here's an interesting article on 'Galvanic Series Relationships'. They're suggesting that for 'harsh' environments, not to connect metals with more than a 0.15V difference on the Annodic index. Alu (0.95) to Copper (0.35) is way more than 0.15V! http://corrosion-doctors.org/Definitions/galvanic-series.htm

borat123

Finally took delivery of the back ordered parts this morning. Being put back together as I type and everything is being teflonified in the process😉