RO water questions

Hey guys I just purchased an ro water system that i plan on using in my brewery and storing water in 55gal plastic drum. I am new to RO and have heard it can be corrosive and have a few questions:

  1. Is untreated RO water safe to heat up in stainless steel boil kettle?
  2. Is untreated RO water safe to use in blichmann therminator?
  3. When using water calculator do I just enter 0 for all inputs with starting water.
  4. Any other precautions to take regarding stainless brewing equipment, hoses, salts, etc.

Thanks everyone!

I have Spike kettles and emailed them about the corrosiveness of RO water. I told them the water may sit in my kettles for us to 36 hours. They told me they do the same and have had no problems. RO is more corrosive but I think you would need exposure to metal for quite some time. No expert here so TIFWIW.

Thanks mike

I haven’t had issues. You should be good with 304 Stainless.

From a Google search.

Edi
There are commercial breweries that use RO water throughout the brewery. Some remove the O2 also.

I fill up a keg with RO at the grocery store and put it on tap at my house, so my keg is almost always full of RO. Haven’t had any issues.

So carbonated RO water?  :wink:

What water calculator are you using?  If you are using Bru’n Water you can select distilled or RO as one of the options.  Martin can weigh in on this as well.  I just had my RO water tested when I recently bought a new water softener.  The water coming out of the RO had only 20 ppm of total dissolved solids in it (TDS) and no other minerals (my well water has 400 grains of hardness which is a lot and black manganese so I have to use RO to brew with).  So yes, you can set all the parameters to zero.

I use bru’n water. I have a lamotte brewlab test kit i plan on using to test ro water. The system i purchased is the HBrewO which i have read mixed reviews on so i guess we will see.

So, in Brunwater do you set the dilution rate at 100% and not alter any other starting measurements, add the malts and then adjust?  I haven’t gone back to Brunwater for a while, as my standard salt additions are pretty much locked in, but I am thinking I should calculate them and test them, again, for peace of mind…

Yes, select either RO or distilled for the dilution water type, and set dilution to 100% (the BW RO profile is generic, typical of most RO, and while Martin has said it’s based on sample RO water whose source had over 800 ppm TDS, with 22 ppm TDS in the RO, there’s little practical difference between it and distilled.)  If you sparge, don’t forget to do this on the Sparge Acidification sheet as well as the Water Adjustment sheet.  Enter grain bill and start playing with the water adjustment as usual.

Thanks.  I hope to have some time tonight to run through the most recent version that I received a while back…doesn’t sound like big fundamental changes to the spreadsheet.

Cheers!

No significant changes from the user perspective,  I think most of the changes are in improved calculations.  One new feature you’ll like, if your last version was lacking it, is the accommodation of SMB.