Hello all just joined this community since I usually peered from outside. Got slightly used machine on the way, previous owner bought it new from WLL a year ago on release. It's been his daily driver and it didn't seem like he did full maintenance. Haven't done a backflush yet with tablet/Cafiza so I'll do it twice or 3 times to purge buildup. Water did come from a brita filter for a bit but city I know has mild water hardness. He switched over to gallon water midway. Is it worth taking it apart and checking the brew boiler? Steam boiler is stainless and 1L so I'm not as concerned. Where would be the best place to source any repair or service parts? Thanks!

You can descale a small machine like Silvia's brew boiler part simply by flushing it with citric acid. Fill the tank with water plus 2 table spoons of citric acid per liter, flush the brew boielr, so it's filled with the descaler and let it sit overnight off, or a few hours turned on, then flush with regular water until all the citric has cleared. Just make sure the steam boiler is filled and off so it doesn' sip in the lemon.

Oh! is it safe for citric acid on brass boilers? The brew boiler is small at .3L and I've always worried that the acid might strip away the lining and discolor it or affect longevity.

ex. How to do citric acid bath?

The standard way of descaling an espresso machine is to take all the metallic parts, which were brass or copper until recently, and bath them in hydrochloric acid, which is a coule of pH lmore acidic than citric. This slightly corrodes the metal, but not enough to affect thirty year old commercial machines that are descaled this way every year.

You get a lot of nosie on the web, but citirc acid is a gentle descaler that may cause significant corrosion after a few centruries of use. It may be that the people worried about it are all museum curators (as in those antique shows "It was worth millions. But you polished it, so now it's worthless")

A real concern is that acids do have an effect on seals. A semicomical outcome is that after a descaling there are all kinds of steam leaks and water drips. The reason is that the failing seals were held together by scale, so that descaling made the machine start leaking. If you look insde the machine and see the fittings coated with white, this is likley to happen. You can either let it be and hope; or also get replacement seals. If this is not what you signed up for, there are few places in Chicago, according to Yelp, that repair machines. I have no recommednations, since I do my own basic maintenance; but they look OK.

Ah okay thanks for that info! I have a ton of citric acid, mostly used for carbonating drinks with my seltzer machine so i'll use a bit here as a good descale solution. Would it be better to dissolve it hot water, run it through the boilers through the reservoir or disassemble boilers and fill the boilers up directly with the descale solution. The former being the easier solution but I think the latter is the best bet if there's significant scale flakes in the boilers it'll need to be purged out that way

After the use you describe, there will hardly be any scale at all in the brew boiler, and you can just do a rinse through descale. There may be a little scale in the steam boiler (higher temperature + water in/steam out = more scale). There you are best off removing a fitting on top, and siphoning the water and descaling solution in and out.