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> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while) Vinegar removes
by amluto 1y ago
> Since I'm too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to clean my coffee machine (the instructions said something about vinegar once in a while)
Vinegar removes limescale, which may or may not be a real problem depending on your water source.
To remove coffee residue, use a dilute solution, freshly prepared, of sodium percarbonate and very very hot water. You can mix ~1 tsp of sodium percarbonate with a cup or two of hot water, and you can also just spoon the sodium percarbonate into a coffee-stained container and pour hot water in.
Sodium percarbonate is basically a stable mixture of sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide that happens to be a solid. It’s an alkaline cleaner and a fairly strong oxidizer. It removes oily things and quite a lot of stains, and it will remove tea and coffee residue almost effortlessly. It’s very nasty on skin when it’s mixed with water and not diluted enough, but it leaves no harmful residue when rinsed — the hydrogen peroxide decomposes to water and oxygen, and sodium carbonate is only at all harmful because of its high pH. It turns into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) at lower pH, and it is soluble enough in water that essentially all of it rinses off.
It’s the active ingredient in most commercial coffee machine cleaners, but you can buy it from a chemical supplier. Just don’t drip any water into the container you store it in (the same goes for commercial coffee machine cleaners). It’s also the active ingredient in most “oxygen bleach” powders.
- 90s_dev 1y agoYour response just makes me more confident that I'm making the right choice by boiling coffee in a pot of water and washing it with plain dish soap afterwards.
- amluto 1y agoIf you ever get that pot or your filter or your mug coated in coffee gunk, you can clean it with sodium percarbonate :)
- 90s_dev 1y agoSometimes when I leave it on too long and it actually boils for a minute or two, there's a coffee ring around the inside of the stainless steel pot. Scrubbing it with a green dish scrub pad gets it off, then soap and water fixes the rest. I never really understood why that ring gets there, but it also gets there from the starch when I boil noodles. I figure it has something to do with electrons on the inside surface of the stainless steel pot losing their ionization or polarization or some sciency stuff. I haven't cared enough to even google it since I know how to fix it and I haven't died yet from it.
- herbst 1y agoYou can just buy the commercial cleaner bottle once a year, follow whatever the bottle says and press the "clean routine" button on almost any machine.
- amluto 1y agoThere are plenty of machines for which the manufacturer cheaped out on buttons and displays, so instead you press a complicated sequence of buttons that is poorly described in the manual. And a machines, especially drip machines, are not easy to safely rinse, so getting the cleaner back out can be extremely challenging.
- 90s_dev 1y agoI was always particularly concerned about that tube where the heated water goes from the bottom to the top and pours into the coffee filter. It's so thin, I could never believe it could be cleaned from whatever buildup is inside it.
- herbst 1y agoYou can't cheap out on a coffee machine. That's basically the one rule if you really like coffee (and health for that matter) Source: I repaired coffee machines for a while as teenager and seen horrible mold or quality machines. Nothing in between
- amluto 1y agoI’ve encountered cheap drip machines, and I’ve encountered pricier drip machines. I have never encountered one that didn’t have an utterly terrible path for the water. And even some rather nice Breville espresso machines have something like three buttons and a couple little LEDs. They work well, but good luck deciding the blink pattern meaning “you must descale me now” and actually running the descaling cycle without a manual.