Bombora Coffee + Water Supplies Business Development Manager Cameron McDonald explains how BRITA’s range of filters can treat and block even the toughest of water conditions.
In March, torrential rain impacted communities across the east coast of Australia, resulting in severe flooding, mass town evacuations and thousands of damaged homes.
After what had already been a wet summer with above-average rainfall, the saturated, close to capacity water catchment areas cannot cope.
The intensity of the floodwaters caused significant erosion of dirt, sand, and clay. As a result, local water agencies estimate that the turbidity or cloudiness of the raw water in flood-affected regions has risen at least 100 times above acceptable levels.
Turbidity is caused by solid particulates within a water source, which can include soil, sand, as well as clay. These particulates can cause significant damage to municipal water that water authorities distribute to communities.
This particularly affects municipal water sources that rely on large-scale sand filters, which can clog under the sheer volume of contaminants, or ultraviolet disinfection systems. This requires water turbidity to be below one NTU (nephelometric turbidity units), water containing one milligram of finely divided silica per litre. This is so the transfer of the disinfecting light can reach and neutralise bacterial coliforms.
So, what does this mean for local small businesses, including cafés? The chances are high that the incoming water supply has suffered sediment and particulate matter ingress.
The key here, is to address this issue before recommissioning your machine, including disconnecting the machine feed line, and running water into a bucket until it is clear of particulate matter.
The next crucial step is changing the water filter as any contamination to the line will also be trapped within the water filter.
Thankfully, this is where BRITA water filters can shine. Its filters are designed to mechanically remove, absorb, and exchange the three most common contaminants found in Australia: chlorine, particulate matter, and of course scale.
Filters are designed to mechanically block or absorb incoming contaminants, including sediment, chlorine, scale, and bacteria.
When a filter is left unused, these contaminants can begin to cause the filter to resemble a stagnant pond internally. They may also affect the structure and overall integrity of the filter, which can lead to the filter dumping contaminants into a coffee machine.
It is for this reason that a filter change should be a part of the recommissioning process of any coffee machine or water dispensing device.
When a coffee machine is left to stand for some time, contaminants tend to settle and form a barrier within solenoids, flow meters, group heads, and boilers. The recommissioning of a machine is best carried out by a qualified technician to ensure that the correct process steps are followed. However, during this process, water filters are over-looked.
When it comes to ideal time to change a water filter, most cafés and service technicians work off time in use, such as three, six or 12-month intervals.
This method potentially risks your machine being supplied by a filter with depleted media, allowing harmful scale and gypsum to block solenoids and destroy boilers.
The best way to ensure that your machine is protected is to change the filter based on the machine’s capacity. This figure can be measured by installing an inline flow meter or using a simple calculation, as shown in the breakout box.
BRITA’s 4 in 1 media composition will protect your machine from critical contaminants that can cause a premature expiry of expensive components.
At Bombora, we work with BRITA for our water filtration needs, and are committed to providing education about the importance of water quality and how it can affect the taste profile of coffee. COVID-19 made it difficult to facilitate the usual onsite training. However, our team produce regular articles on the water testing, performance, usage benefits and handy tips regarding water filtration, which can be found on our website.
To ensure our customers always receive top quality water, we stock Australia’s number one filter brand. This ensures that we have a vast array of filtration products to choose from when providing solutions for our customer’s applications.
We also offer free inhouse water testing to ensure that we fully understand each customer’s unique application requirements and provide the correct solution, which ultimately results in great water.
The Purity C range is a staple of Bombora’s product offering. It guarantees optimum water quality for every application of the coffee machine within the Australian market.
Its quick-change, multi-purposed head allows anyone to easily do a filter interchange between the Purity C Finest and Quell offerings, depending on machine boiler types. This removes the need for a technician to change your filter and provides a cost-effective solution. Namely, we recommend the Quell filter range for copper boilers and the finest filter offerings for stainless steel boilers that require PH buffering to help prevent low PH corrosion.
BRITA continues to be a leading manufacturer of softening-based water filtration solutions for roasters or café owners. Bombora has shared a working partnership with BRITA since 2008.
We believe a good business relationship requires trust, respect, inclusion, and open communication. All these attributes exist within our working relationship with BRITA, and this is the key reason why they are considered a valued partner of ours.
Beyond being a great company to do business with, take great reassurance in the fact that its filters provide the best solution for all water qualities and conditions nationwide, even in the most extreme situations such as floodwaters.
Our thoughts are with those businesses impacted up north. We wish them well on their path of recovery.
For more information, visit www.bomborasupplies.com.au or www.brita.com.au
Cameron’s recommendation to change a water filter:
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1 shot = 10 grams of coffee.
10 shots = 100 grams of coffee x 10 = 1 kg 100 shots per kg x 40kg per week usage = 4000 shots. 4000 shots times the 50 ml of water per shot = 200 litres. The C150 has a capacity of 4766 at 70 ppm. 4766 divided by 100 litres = 23.83 weeks. |
This article appears in the April 2022 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
