Descaling HX machine.

Planet X

So.......I regularly take the E61 group head apart to regrease and wash out except this time I took the "Mushroom" off to look see. To my horror 😀 a bit of Calcium Carbonate was building up on it. Like to look after my machine (Rocket Appart.) and looked this up. No, I wasn't using the supplied water tank filter supplied. Mistake. Slap!

Few YouT tutorials on the issue so I bought a bottle of liquid descaled for coffee machines specifically. Was going to buy Citric Acid and "home Made" descale but thought otherwise. The liquid one is cheap enough not wanting to skimp a few Euro.

Apparently it's east enough to drain the boiler tank, empty the machine and descale. You cannot, I'd imagine, just dump the descaled into the water tank and flush it through as it would be diluted even more with the boiler tank water and be less effective.

Just waiting on the postman.

Will put up a few pics when I get the descaled and show the build up, probably at the weekend.

(Dublin tap water so not immune to a bit of scale it seems)

Planet X

Planet X

So.........happy enough with that.

Got my descaler today, put the machine on, flushed the boiler out and loaded the diluted descale mix into the tank. Not 100% descaled but a big improvement. Probably three years without doing this.

For some reason .......I thought that I'd read somewhere that, E61 machines didn't need to be descaled. My Gaggia Classic was regularly descaled but hey........you learn.

Pencilled in for 6 months for next treatment. It's a long auld process and flushing flushing flushing. Allowing machine /pump to cool down during the process also.