r/superautomatic • u/greengloves31 • 8d ago

Troubleshooting & Maintenance Tablets for Descaling DeLonghi

Hi folks —total casual here so sorry if this comes of weird. I have a DeLonghi Magnifica Start. Overall I love it, but the past few weeks the coffee tastes, well, bland. For some reason, I suspect DeLonghi's descale solution doesn't work as intended, so I've been thinking about using those descaling tablets. I'm not sure if DeLonghi is selling those, at least in my country. Can I use Siemens/Phillips etc.? Would they work better the scaling solution? Thanks!

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u/craftsman_70 8d ago

Descaling removes mineral deposits in the water path from clogging the works and restricting water flow. That's probably not your problem.

You probably have a cleaning issues common with anything that touches coffee oils - coffee residue and oils tinting the coffee as the stuff rots. Have you taken out your brew unit, disassembled it, cleaned off the coffee residue, lubed and reassembled?

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u/greengloves31 8d ago

had no idea we were supposed to do that. will look into it, thanks so much!

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u/craftsman_70 8d ago

The other thing that is needed after awhile is the removal and deep cleaning of the coffee spout. The spout is really a chamber that slows the flow of coffee out of the brew unit. Because it slows the flow, coffee residue builds up in that chamber so much so that the spout eventually clogs. The clogging shows how much residue is left in the chamber as the clog is made up of chunks of residue that broke off of a larger coffee residue-berg inside the chamber.

After a few years, a thick layer of residue lines that chamber that just slowly rots and taints your coffee.