Descaling the kettle

kinger101

Nobody would care how much citric acid you buy and what you intend to do with it. It's a fairly benign chemical and in plentiful supply. Easily ordered from E-bay.

arbrighton

We have a home brew shop in our town. EASY....

Chrishazle

Lime scale is Calcium Carbonate, any acid will remove it, the weaker the acid the longer it takes. In a hardware store you can buy Spirit of Salts, which is concentrated Hydrochloric Acid - but do NOT us it neat, put water in the kettle then add the Spirit of Salts carefully, it will fizz like crazy and remove all traces of limescale quite quickly. Rubber gloves also recommended. I worked extensivly with Hydrochloric Acid so am comfortable playing with it - but there are many kettle descaling products you can buy in a decent hardware store that are easier to use.

trailingspouse

When we lived in a hard water area I just used ordinary brown malt vinegar then re-boiled the kettle with fresh water once.

Once you've got it clean, you need to keep it clean - in hard water areas you can find special gizmos for 'collecting' the limescale in the kettle, they're like small wirewool balls. You just pop them in the kettle and they attract the limescale so that it doesn't clog up the kettle. You can clean them by simply squeezing them out under running water from time to time.

cherydee

I've just bought a see through glass kettle and I've only used it a month and I've had to descale it with Oust, as I didn't like the look of it on show. This is the first see through kettle I've bought, I would hardly ever descale the kettle when I couldn't see the inside.

Wassa123

Just pour a bit of lemon juice mixed with water in the ketttle and boil it. Works wonders for our glass see through kettle.

Cyclamen

We have very hard water here so descaling kettle is a regular job.

We use brown malt vinegar.. yes i know its meant to be white vinegar but I couldn't find it either and this works fine. It does smell a little when you boil it up, but opening a window soon solves that. A couple of rinses and boils and its all fine to go again.

We also have some small steel mesh cylinders that we leave in the bottom of the kettle. They attract the limescale and are easy to tip out and roll in sink to break the scale off.

I find it cheaper than the chemicals in the long run.

Head_The_Ball

Chrishazle wrote: »

Lime scale is Calcium Carbonate, any acid will remove it, the weaker the acid the longer it takes. In a hardware store you can buy Spirit of Salts, which is concentrated Hydrochloric Acid - but do NOT us it neat, put water in the kettle then add the Spirit of Salts carefully, it will fizz like crazy and remove all traces of limescale quite quickly. Rubber gloves also recommended. I worked extensivly with Hydrochloric Acid so am comfortable playing with it - but there are many kettle descaling products you can buy in a decent hardware store that are easier to use.

Using Hydrochloric Acid, even heavily diluted, to descale a kettle is not very sensible.

You may be used to using it, most others are not.

If you overdose a kettle with Citric acid or a similar mild acid you will do little or no harm.

If you get it wrong with Hydrochloric acid you can easily lose your face.

Or worse.

Head_The_Ball

firefox1956 wrote: »

You might find citric acid difficult to get hold of in any reasonable quantity.
I 'believe' it is use in connection with the drug industry & quantities are somewhat limited !!!
HTH

It is widely and easily available on eBay, other online sites and in some shops.

There are 984 listings for it on eBay alone.

Annie1960

It may depend on exactly how hard your water is. Here near the Chilterns the water is VERY hard and white vinegar does not get rid of it.

The pound shops sell descaling products that I have found good, but need to be used regularly.