brass fittings/soda fountain ??

[Brandon]

as some of you may or may not know i bought a soda fountain off of another ingo'er here recently... i am finally getting it all set up and ready to use. some of my problems installing it has led me onto some reading that co2 on brass/copper fittings can cause you to be sick.

ive read on a beer brewing website you can use brass on the co2 side, just not the beer side because the beer reacts....

so is anyone able to say for sure if brass is or is not ok to use?

 

[hooky]

Brass on the beer side doesn't work because beer is acidic and it will cause the brass to leach lead. I'm assuming it's the same issue with soda. Technically if you have moisture in your CO2 system, you're creating carbonic acid which will leach lead out of brass. You could pickle the brass to eliminate the leaching, but I went with stainless and don't worry about it. On the CO2 side, I did the same thing with exception of the brass in the regulator.

HTH

 

[c3d4b2]

I would also be cautious if any of the fountain mixes contained the phosphoric acid. Phosphoric is know to be incompatible with brass. I remember when I was younger putting a brown copper penny in some coke and it coming out the shinny copper color.

 

[CountryBoy19]

Brass on the beer side doesn't work because beer is acidic and it will cause the brass to leach lead. I'm assuming it's the same issue with soda. Technically if you have moisture in your CO2 system, you're creating carbonic acid which will leach lead out of brass. You could pickle the brass to eliminate the leaching, but I went with stainless and don't worry about it. On the CO2 side, I did the same thing with exception of the brass in the regulator.

HTH

Hmmmm... .just how much lead can be leached out of an alloy that doesn't contain lead? The only lead in brass should be trace contamination, and in that case it's no different than trace contamination of anything else.

 

[hooky]

Hmmmm... .just how much lead can be leached out of an alloy that doesn't contain lead? The only lead in brass should be trace contamination, and in that case it's no different than trace contamination of anything else.

"lead free" brass faucets can leach up to 11ppb and still be considered lead free by definition. I think 15ppb is the threshold where water is considered contaminated now and you have to start jumping through hoops. Not all forms of brass are lead free. Lead was/is commonly added to improve machinability (if thats a word) and the majority of brass today is recycled. I'm not able to test to find out, so I chose to eliminate the risk.

Delta moved to eliminate brass completely from some of their faucets because of liability issues with the California law stating no more than .25% lead is acceptable. Now they sell that diamond seal technology that contains no brass parts in contact with the water.