Description: by Arik Devens
I recently purchased a Grohe Blue Chilled & Sparkling 2.0 Faucet and, aside from it being fiendishly complicated to install, I'm very, very, happy with it. It's an absurd luxury, but the ability to have chilled filtered water and sparkling water from the tap is absolutely incredible. Key to that experience is the quality of the water though, and initially we were very disappointed. The sparkling water tasted like someone had heard about carbonation before, but had never actually tried it. That led to a ton
Grohe makes this stuff annoyingly complicated. For one thing, the entire instructions are Ikea-style, with basically no words. For another, there doesn't seem to actually be a manual one can find anywhere. They do include a water hardness test with the faucet, and that's the place to start. If your water is below 7 or so on the dKh scale, like most city water will be, you are going to have a problem. Essentially, your carbonate hardness is just not high enough to grab onto the CO2 and create a satisfying dr
The solution is to install one or more remineralization filters into the water pipeline. These filters exist because the standard reverse osmosis water filters strip out useful minerals as well as harmful ones. The idea is that you install one of these filters after the RO-system and before your faucet, thus adding back things like magnesium and potassium to your water. I'm honestly not sure how well these things work for that purpose, but they do work for ours. However, in our case, instead of installing i