Hey guys Im a proud owner of Delonghi Magnifica S automatic espresso machine for 6 months now. Our water is super hard with loads of scale and I have been cleaning (descaling) machine with Delonghi EcoDecalc, but friend recommends this one (much cheaper):
Is this safe to use? It says it contains citric, lactic and malic acid. It also says to use 50 ml on 500 ml of water while Delonghi EcoDecalc should be 100 ml on 1700 ml (I think) of water. Its almost 2x difference and I was thinking if acids are simmilar I should use 100 ml of acid for full tank anyway.
We abuse our machine by making loads of coffe and tea. With scale settings on max we get descaling alarm every 3-4 weeks. It used to be on medium settings, but machine almost clogged completely once...so thats why max settings. Delonghi liquid is not cheap, but dont want to take any risk for 30€ a year. On the other hand, I dont want to pay 10€ for a 2-3€ product just because it says Delonghi on the bottle.
What do you use for your machine? How often do you descale?
Note that citric acid works a bit more nuanced than many other descalers: it acts as a chelating agent at high concentrations (2x the Ca2+ concentration) and is more effective at removing scale because of this effect, but at lower concentrations the effect might actually be reversed because it can form solid calcium citrate, which has a very low solubility in water.
If you are using citric acid based descaler you should make sure that you are always using enough of it to avoid the formation of calcium citrate.
Do you know roughly how much 'enough' is?
If you want to be super exact about it it would be roughly 4 times the mass of limescale + mass of already dissolved CaCO~3~ in your tap water (you can look that up if you know the hardness index of your water).
But really just don't be stingy with citric acid and it will be fine is what i am saying.
Here is the math:
::: spoiler Spoiler
2 frac {210.14 g/mol } {100.0869 g/mol} approx 4.2
Thanks! Looks like our hardness is 42 PPM. I usually descale my machine whenever it pops the light on, but it doesn't seem to build up much of anything.