I live in an area with soft water, is it okay to use filtered water from my fridge for steaming.
Yes
Can you explain your concern about soft water? …having it is usually advantageous, (I really wish I had soft water) miss it so much.
I don’t have a concern with soft water, the manual recommends distilled water, so I was simply inquiring if my water was okay, given it has fewer minerals than hard water.
Soft water will still cause scale if you just keep boiling it away. The scale might dissolve in water, but no water ever flows through the steamer to dissolve it. Distilled or RO water should leave no scale so never need descaling.
Just to be clear…
Filtered isn’t distilled.
Distilled water process = water boiled, vapourises, then condenses again at point of cooling & the drip drip into the collecting vessel.
However they both tend to acheive the same “clean up & remove” principle by different technique / material, fridges tend to have the pour through activated carbon as the common medium, fine as long as what you are pouring through is attracted to the activated carbon material.
Both variants remove minerals & leave the water “flat” devoid of flavour / neutral.
Good old white vinegar is very effective as a limescale cleaner & is very cheap, …for the ovens vapourisation spray the smell of vinegar is something you either love or hate & don’t mind having it hang around, obviously it is a great grease cutting fluid, so think about its pro’s & cons for potential use.
I use it in brewing, vessel cleaning, kettles, shower heads etc, a “long soak” for my anova sous vide unit (not oven) is 15 minutes & rinse, a kettle several quick boils followed by cooling & very good rinse & reboils, which is what you cannot really do here unless you have an eye for how long it takes to show the initial signs of gunking up before a maintainence run is carried out, as scale will be the bottom of the tank not much required to effectively remove deposits.
One of those things i’d recommend experimenting with as likely occasional use of vinegar as a cleaning agent is a lot cheaper than buying in distilled water or the slow pour through of fridge active carbon filtration.
I live in a very hard water area.
Our pipes were thick with calcification affecting flow, as a slow burning measure which loosened decades old calcium deposits for several years (I removed pipes for inspection) a low voltage coil was placed around the water mains “in” …it severely curtailed the calc build up in kettles by ensuring it stayed as a molecular liquid slurry (invisible to the eye) in the main, some people classify them as shopping channel cr@p that doesn’t work, but I know what the pipes & hot water tank were like before & then over time it was nigh on gone, so clearly it worked, inspection of a uk DHW tank is a simple screw removal, slide the heating element out, look in with a torch, our downstairs pipes needed work replacing naff fittings & stop points, so I removed & inspected on several occasions…
It is also used “known as a vinegar run” to clean out alcohol distillation condenser tubes which are packed out with ceramic or metal infill which is used to remove “off flavours” (filtration)as it rises up the tube, the vinegar run removes gunk / green …green applies to copper made condensers especially, but it is reported as a blue taint more often than not with clear alcohol, whilst it is not harmful if that happens it is off-putting, a clean is required & the coloured liquid is put through again to send it back to cling onto the pipe inner / material & clean spirit comes back through (to finish the example story)
Hopefully then you can buy some white vinegar & see what works for you, if it isn’t muddy swamp water i’d be tempted to just use tap & simply have a cleaning regime at the ready before things get claggy.
You can’t go wrong using desiccated water, but you’ll need twice as much.