How Often Should You Descale an Espresso Machine? The Full Cafetto Renew Procedure

September 5, 2026

Short answer: every three to six months, depending on your local water quality. That is Cafetto's own figure, and the qualifier is doing real work — in hard-water areas you will be at the three-month end, and if your machine has its own descale prompt, follow the machine manufacturer rather than a calendar.

The longer answer, including the exact procedure, is below.

First: a cleaner is not a descaler

This is the single most useful thing to understand about machine care, and it is where most cafés go wrong.

Espresso machine cleaners are alkaline. They attack coffee oils and residues. They do almost nothing to scale.
Descalers are acidic. They dissolve scale out of the boiler and pipework. They are not what you use for oily group heads.

They are opposite chemistries solving opposite problems. Running cleaning tablets religiously and never descaling leaves your boiler furring up invisibly; descaling without cleaning leaves rancid oils in the group head. You need both, on different schedules. We have set out the symptoms of each side by side in descaler or cleaning tablets?

The same logic explains why Cafetto recommends alternating acidic and alkaline milk line cleaners — acid targets milk's mineral deposits, alkaline targets the protein soils.

What scale actually does to a machine

Hard water simply means a lot of dissolved calcium and magnesium. Heat it, and those minerals come out of solution as a white crust on your heating element. From there:

Temperature stability goes first — the element has to fight through an insulating layer.
Water flow and pressure drop as the pipework narrows.
Energy consumption rises, because it takes more power to heat the same water.
Service calls, part replacement and unplanned downtime all increase.

Once scale is inside the boiler and pipework, it can only be removed with a specific acidic descaling chemical. You cannot flush it out with water and you cannot filter it out after the fact.

The counter-intuitive part

Cafetto makes a point worth repeating: espresso made with harder water often tastes better, because extraction intensity increases with water hardness. The problem with hard water is not what it does to the cup. It is what it does to the machine making the cup.

So “our coffee tastes fine” is not evidence that you do not have a scale problem. It may be evidence that you do.

Does a water filter mean I can skip descaling?

No. Filtered water still requires descaling — how often depends on whether your filter actually has scale-inhibiting properties, and many do not. A correctly functioning reverse-osmosis system should not require descaling, but that depends on the system working correctly and being maintained.

The procedure — Cafetto Renew Descaler

These are Cafetto's steps for their Renew Descaler, which comes as 25g single-dose sachets and a 2KG jar.

Espresso machines

Dissolve one 25g sachet in 1 litre of warm water. Pour the solution into the water tank.
Remove the filter holder and switch the machine on.
Draw roughly one cup of solution through the brew spout, then roughly a quarter cup through the steam arm.
On a fully automatic machine: run the whole volume through the steam wand instead, using the hot-water setting rather than the steam setting.
Let the machine stand for 15 minutes, then repeat step 3. Keep repeating until the full litre has gone through.
Rinse thoroughly — flush a complete tank of clean fresh water through the machine, exiting via both the brew head and the steam wand.

Do not skip or shorten step 5. You are flushing an acid out of a machine that is about to make someone's coffee.

Kettles and hot water urns

Fill three-quarters full with potable water.
Add one 25g sachet.
Boil.
Discard the solution completely.
Refill with fresh water and boil again to rinse.

Coffee brewers

Dissolve one sachet in 1 litre of warm water.
Run it through according to your brewer manufacturer's instructions.
Rinse with fresh water.

A note on S15 Cleaning Tablets

We stock Cafetto S15 tablets alongside Renew, and it is worth being precise about what they are for, because it is easy to get wrong.

S15 is a cleaning tablet for selected fully automatic espresso machines. It is not a descaler, and Cafetto publishes no backflushing procedure for it. If you have a traditional machine with a group head you backflush manually, S15 is not the product Cafetto points you to.

On a fully automatic machine the correct approach is to match the tablet specification to what your machine calls for, then run the machine's own cleaning program. Those programs run anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on the machine and its volume, and the tablet is designed to dissolve on that schedule. Cafetto manufactures tablets in different shapes, doses, diameters and hardnesses precisely because dispensing-line designs differ.

Using the wrong tablet — or skipping the cycle — can leave a machine prompting for a clean, or locking out functions until it gets one.

Available as an 8-tablet blister pack or a 100-tablet jar.

The rest of the routine

Descaling is the quarterly job. These are the ones that keep it from becoming urgent:

Steam wand, after every milk: purge the valve briefly, wipe with a damp cloth before milk can crust.
Steam wand, daily: soak the nozzle in hot water, rinse, wipe.
Steam wand, weekly: clear the holes with a steam wand brush, soak in hot water, wipe.
Grinder, end of every day. Espresso-fine grounds clog burrs; a clogged grinder loses grind speed, loses dosing consistency and runs hotter. Regular cleaning extends burr life.
Machine and grinder, at close-down. At minimum once per day.

One specific warning from Cafetto: do not use Grinder Clean in a fully automatic espresso machine. They explicitly advise against it.

Two things we are deliberately not telling you

We would rather be straight about the limits of what the manufacturer publishes.

We are not claiming this protects your warranty. Cafetto makes no warranty claim anywhere we could find, and neither will we. Check your machine manufacturer's terms.

You may find a “descale fortnightly” figure elsewhere. It appears in one older Cafetto education article and it conflicts with their own FAQ by roughly an order of magnitude. We have gone with the FAQ's three-to-six months, because it is the more current source and the only one that qualifies the answer by water hardness — which is the variable that actually decides the answer.

Procedures above are Cafetto's, from their product and FAQ pages, restated in our words. Your machine manufacturer's instructions take precedence over any general guidance, including this. If you are unsure what your machine needs, ask us before you run anything through it.