Descaling Solutions is a site dedicated to giving you the best solutions for descaling your coffee maker, espresso machine, hot water kettle, and whatever else heats up water. We love using citric for descaling and it works wonderfully well in 99.9% of the situations we encounter. Can’t say 100% because that’s probably not a thing that’s possible on this earth.
We’ve been using citric acid for 20 years and it all started in an electronics repair shop in the basement of a commercial building. Activities included shorting out multimeters by testing microwave transformers and fixing vacuum cleaners and coffee makers. We “discovered” citric acid when servicing coffee makers that were brought in for repairs because they just slowly dribbled water through the coffee filter and/or made lukewarm coffee. They really just needed to be cleaned. That’s the case in many situations when an appliance doesn’t function exactly as intended.
We soon fell in love with descaling everything with citric acid and became local heroes because we knew something the others didn’t. I guess this was in the relatively early days of the web, back in 2003. It seems like another century and we didn’t know how easy we had it. Anyway, on to the present. There are dozens of descaling solutions on the market and every single one of them uses one or a few of a select few products available to clean and/or descale your coffee machine and/or hot water appliances.
In those days we didn’t see super automatic machines, partly because they were a novelty, and in our neck of the woods, they were not common. The deluxe options were Bunn machines with a hot water reservoir. Of course there was really no way to descale these without ripping them apart, an operation well beyond most homeowners. Tbh, I would never even consider one of those today unless they added a dump valve on the bottom to drain everything out of the tank. Anyway, those did fall out of favor, probably due to the reservoirs filling up with pounds of limescale.
So, we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two, and we definitely know about descaling solutions. It’s really very simple. Use citric acid and 99.9% of the time you’ll find yourself with an appliance that performs very close to as it did when new.