Decalcification of a Coffee Machine

When looking for a coffee machine, make sure that it has a decalcification process that:

1. Notifies you that it needs to be run, based on the level of water hardness you are adding to the tank (for those in South Africa normally a hardness of about 6 degrees is a good rule of thumb)
   
2. Runs an automated process to de-scale or decalcify the machine.
   

Even with these in place I would suggest that you run a decalcification process on your machine at least once ever 1,000 cups of coffee, and if you are using filtered water at least once every 7,500 cup. Why I here you ask? Well since this cleans the internal plumbing making sure it is free of any calcium and scale. Which in turn helps with the heating process and ensures the machine lasts a lot longer than a machine whose owner avoids running this process

This is one of the reasons why I originally loved the Jura Coffee Machine range, I still do by the way. They were early pioneers in tracking the number of cup of coffee made, the actual quantity of water used (eith oz or ml), and automatically recommending descale and cleaning processes based on the number they had found gave the best results. Other machines have since followed suit like lambs to the flock. The funny thing is that you still get so called experts in the field ignoring these programs, and even disabling them, they should be drawn a quartered.

Decalcifying a coffee machine in most manuals can seem a little confusing. You need to have specific tablets or liquid to do the job and you also need to start a process. For those machines where it is not automatic or they do not recommend it. A guide is to use about 500ml of warm water (about 1 ½ cups), make sure that if you are using tablets they are fully dissolved, then run that liquid through the machine as if making coffee. Once that is done, run at least 1.5 times that amount through to clear the cleaning fluid out and then the machine should be good to go.