Descale your espresso machines regularly!

Muriatic acid can be used also in very diluted form- the pros use it for bad cases of scale- outdoors!
 
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Just made myself an Americano with my newly descaled and cleaned machine. Much better. Had to grind a little finer but only one tweak required. Nice to be able to taste the dark chocolate and hazelnut in these beans again. :)
 
SouthernChap said:
Dear God alive.

I have just run 13 sachets of Puly descaler through my 2003 Gaggia Classic.

I'm not convinced the ebay seller was entirely honest about the 'complete descale and clean' anyway but when I disassembled it to do my pre-use checks and fit the PID controller, the boiler was reasonably tidy inside so eh.

I've since abused the poor thing for the past 9 months by only descaling it once. My defence that I ran out of descaler and kept forgetting to order some more is a pretty poor one (I have been running Puly Cafe through it weekly, though, since I have tons of that!).

So now I've done that and flushed it through with a couple of tanks of clean water, it's a clean with the Puly Cafe and another flush through, a new BWT water filter and a run of the auto-tune on the PID, I get to start dialling in the beans I have. Hopefully I'm still pretty close on grind settings, temperature and pressure, because I'm a little low on beans.:oops:

Oddly, I'd never let my tools (hand or machine) get to this state.
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vinegar.. I do it a couple of times a year. citric acid also works.
no need for a special descaler.
 
Nesse1 said:
Interesting. Sulphamic acid is available from Home Depot in the USA for cheap.
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Sulfamic acid is the basic building block for the super secret sulfur-bearing compound in evapaorust! Cheap, safe, and synergizes the citric acid. Boiler scale is metal, after all... In one inland basin aquifer I studied in university, you could literally concentrate uranium from the scale in the resident's hot water heaters. Groundwater is kooky like that.
 
pontiac428 said:
Sulfamic acid is the basic building block for the super secret sulfur-bearing compound in evapaorust! Cheap, safe, and synergizes the citric acid. Boiler scale is metal, after all... In one inland basin aquifer I studied in university, you could literally concentrate uranium from the scale in the resident's hot water heaters. Groundwater is kooky like that.
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really , uranium in very small trace amounts? or in dangerous qtys?
 
woodchucker said:
really , uranium in very small trace amounts? or in dangerous qtys?
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Single digit percentages by mass. I was dropping oxidizers into wells and watching the stuff come out from the surrounding rock. There was a corresponding spike in alpha and beta radiation in the water, but most of the uranium was at ground state and not enriched beyond the natural prevalence. Of course, lead and arsenic came up with it, but I was shocked at the numbers in water heater scale.
 
SouthernChap said:
it was an unpleasant experience.
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No Kidding! So unpleasant I refuse to drink unless it has been thrice boiled and quad filtered and even then I would sooner drink bottled water!

It literally is disgusting and you can literally smell AND taste the chlorination.
 
pontiac428 said:
Single digit percentages by mass. I was dropping oxidizers into wells and watching the stuff come out from the surrounding rock. There was a corresponding spike in alpha and beta radiation in the water, but most of the uranium was at ground state and not enriched beyond the natural prevalence. Of course, lead and arsenic came up with it, but I was shocked at the numbers in water heater scale.
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that would seem likely thinking about it. We have radon so, while its the breakdown of radium, it's also from uranium 238 . so seems very likely that the scale would have some.
 
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