There’s a bunch of deep dives on water chemistry, but I mix third wave water packets into one gallon of distilled water.

Do not use straight distilled water though. It will damage the machine and taste very very bad.

https://youtu.be/0ipvBdWaVzQ

I used this, but I’ve installed the shades pid, shades pressure gauge, and a dimmer mod so I was fairly familiar with the innards.

Consumer carbon filters don’t really remove enough hardness to be effective. For convenience I use distilled gallons and third wave espresso packets. There are cheaper methods though.

I wasn’t using the correct water, and after about two years I needed to replace my valve. After inspection my boiler was also beyond descaling and the steam valve was drippy. I replaced those parts because I could but only the solenoid valve was required. FWIW there are videos on how to clean the valve (after removing it) but they didn’t work for me.

Unifi is good hardware for security, but it’s ok hardware for privacy. They require cloud connectivity for setup, and it incessantly checks in with their cloud, even though cloud account is disabled. Pfsense is an amazing solution but I chose unifi for convenience and availability of hardware (particularly WiFi access points).