I had planned to do a full descale on my rotary Bric today, but ran short on time and ended up doing a 'partial' descale: flushed the HX line, then did a modified boiler flush (opened hot water tap until refill kicked in and drew descaling solution into the boiler; did that 2-3 times to get a decent amount of solution into the boiler; let the solution do its work for about an hour). This seemed to work quite well, and took far less time than my usual routine (which involves removing the shell, disconnecting the auto-fill sensor, and so on). Given the ease of this process, I thought I might alter my descale routine to do this partial boiler descale twice a year: it descales most of the boiler and the heating elements, which is what's most important to me. Because this process doesn't overfill the boiler and so won't get at the scale around the water line, I would every second year do a full boiler fill that takes care of the scale around the water line. But it left me with two questions that more experienced users may be able to answer:

- The one area this partial descale doesn't touch is the steam wand, and I'm wondering whether there's a chance to have scale buildup around the steam wand/boiler connection (maybe steam doesn't carry minerals?).

- During the HX descale, I noticed that pressure in the boiler was dropping slowly while the pump was pushing water through the group. The bowl with the solution was about a foot (at most) below the Bric's water intake, which worked well in the past ... but I also never really looked at the boiler pressure gauge during past descalings. Is it normal for the boiler pressure to drop a little when it has to suck water from a non-pressurized receptacle (normally, the machine is on the main water mains, of course, and has external inline pressure), or am I causing the pump to strain? If so, can pulling water from ~ 1 foot below for a few rounds of HX flush and 2-3 partial boiler refills damage the pump?

Thanks!

I do it this way for my Vetrano. When drawing the de-scaler solution into the boiler, I try to tilt the machine sideways, which allows the boiler to fill slightly more. This, I feel, will get the most of the scale at the water line.