cushman
From experience, you can use milk kefir grains for water kefir. But it won't be as good as water kefir grains itself. This is because water
kefir grains bacteria feed on glucose and fructose while the milk kefir grains bacteria mainly feed off of lactose.
What happens when you switch the medium from milk to water, the bacteria that feed on lactose starts to dwindle down in numbers while the bacteria that feed off of glucose and fructose multiply and become the dominant ones.