Hi,

I am finally getting my Single Group Astoria set up in my kitchen and hard plumbed. I want to descale it, but want to do it right. I can't seem to find an idiot's (me) guide to doing this online. What would you experts do? Which descaling product? Do I need to funnel it into the boiler? I have already taken the boiler apart and cleaned it out and it was surprisingly clean, I just want to get some descaler in all the lines.

Thanks for your help, this site has become an obsession.

Kevin

Well after a year with mine, I noticed a funny taste to my coffee and decided to descale it. With all the opinions of people floating around on various forms of descaling, not to descale etc, I opted to descale.

What I did was fill my boiler with the manual fill lever to the top, unscrew the pressure valve at the top, pour in the descaler solution and put the valve back in and snug it up. I let it sit for an hour and came back and switched it on to get heat/steam, then began flushing.

I wish there was a quicker way, I've gotta find one cause this is what I ended up doing to get it done. Once the pressure got up, I turned on the hot water valve to get the descaler out of the boiler. Turn on the group head, to get the solution through the group, turned on the steam wand etc etc. I kept this process up, refilling the boiler over and over, building up steam/pressure, flushing and repeating.

This took quite a while, roughly 1 to 2 hours total cause the descaler solution was a pain to get out of the system entirely. I'm now looking into a commercial water softener/filter system. I have city water so it's treated, with what exactly I don't know.

Overall it's a lengthy process, due to the huge boiler but once it's done, it's done