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Descaling My Automatic Coffee Machine

Descaling And Cleaning The Coffee Line Of Your Automatic Coffee Machine

This is part two of our three part guide on how to get the best tasting drinks out of your automatic coffee machine. If  your coffee is not quite tasting right even after following our day to day cleaning suggestions in part 1, it might be that your machine needs have it’s coffee line pilled and/or be descaled. We will give you a step by step guide on how to do this in this post.

Descaling Your Automatic Coffee MachineCafetto Descaler Sachets

It a good idea to descale your machine at about once every three months. In our service centre we use Caffeto Descaler to descale automatic coffee machines. The following descaling process will take about 30-45 minutes to complete (the process may vary slightly depending on the make and model of your machine):

1. Dissolve the contents of one sachet in a little bit of warm water

2. Pour the dissolved solution into the water tank of your machine

3. Top up the water tank with cold water

4. Place a large container (a 2ltr ice cream container will do the trick) underneath the steam wand

5. Select the “descale” or “decalcify” option in the menu of your machine and press enter (depending on the machine model you may have to turn on the steam wand to start the descaling process).

6. The process should take about 30-45 mins to complete and will empty the water tank of the machine.

7. Once the descaling process has finished the screen will display “Descaling Complete”

8. Turn off the steam knob

9. Remove the water tank and rinse it out with some cold water

10. Refill the water tank with cold water and put it back on the machine

11. The display should read “Rinsing.” Press “Enter” and turn on the steam knob (the rinsing process will take 2-3 minutes)

12. Once the rinsing cycle is complete, the screen will display “Rinsing Finished”

13. Turn off the steam knob

14. Refill the water tank

15. Turn the power to the machine off and then on again.

You have successfully descaled your coffee machine!

Cleaning The Coffee LineCafetto-Tevo-Mini

As well as limescale, coffee can start to build up in the pipes in your automatic coffee machine. If this coffee isn’t cleaned out with a cleaning tablet, it can start to taint the taste of your coffee drinks.

Each make of automatic coffee machine requires a different type of cleaning tablet to clean the coffee line so be sure to check our range to make sure you get the right one. For the Saeco and Gaggia machines which we offer, the process is pretty straight forward. We recommend the following this process about once every three months:

1. Put one cleaning tablet into the pre-ground chute

2. Go into the menu, select “rinse cycle” and press enter. This will start a rinse cycle which will take two to three minutes.

3. Once this rinse has completed, remove the brew unit and rinse under warm water, making sure  there is no white residue from the cleaning tablet on the brew unit.

4. Remove any coffee from the disc of the brew unit

5. Put the brew unit back into the machine

6. Press the “pre-ground” button and then make a coffee (without any coffee in the pre-ground chute)

Once you have completed these six steps your coffee line should be nice and clean and ready to make coffee.

If you have followed our day to day cleaning guidelines, cleaned the coffee line and descaled your machine as per above you should hopefully be pouring delicious coffee. However, there is one more factor that we haven’t covered yet – the grind and shot settings of your machine. Check out our next post regarding setting the grinder and shot length on your automatic coffee machine.

Did you know that if you rent a coffee machine from Segafredo Zanetti New Zealand you don’t need to descale your machine or clean the coffee line – we do it for you. You can contact us about renting a machine here.

Need some help pilling or descaling your coffee machine? Either give us a call on 0800 377 737 or ask a question in the comments below.