Our three year old Moccamaster Select is not well. Over the last day or two there were funny noises coming form the shower head and it was taking longer to brew. So today I ran a cleaning cycle using usual coffee maker cleaner. The problem got worse rather than better. It starts off normally, but quickly the flow died to a trickle. Now steam comes out of the nozzles not hot water.
Has anyone had anything like this? Ive started contacting Moccamaster support but it looks like a slow process.
Machine has had normal, daily, use - nothing untoward. Cleaning cycle every time we start a new 100 pack of filters. My understanding is these machines are pretty sturdy and reliable.
The symptoms sure sound like it’s clogged with scale, even with the regular descaling. I have been using Urnex Dezcal for this for several years, it’s stronger than some descaling products and includes sulfamic acid in addition to citric acid. I wonder if the process can be repeated multiple times to try to dislodge any clog.
We use filtered water as the machine would calcify very quickly otherwise. Then I use citric acid once a month for descaling, it’s natural and very effective (also for dishwasher btw).
I tend to agree with Stan in terms of what I would do. Run another descaling cycle (or two) and stop it during the cycle a couple of times to allow the descaler longer contact times.
If you use your own descaler like citric acid, consider increasing the concentration.
Based on your description of your care, it doesn’t sound like that is the issue, but you never know. The concept of the machine is pretty darn simple, so there isn’t a ton to troubleshoot.
Do you throw the shower head in the dishwasher occasionally? That’s works as a descaling of it. Perhaps it is getting a little restricted? Just randomly thinking of things.
When the steam is coming out of the shower head does the water level in the tank stay the same? Sounds like the heating element isn’t getting as hot as it should be, not much else going on inside. The water has to get to the boiling point to get pushed out. Here is a good look inside one of these.
Basically letting the cleaning solution sit in the boiler for a couple of hours. I’ll try later today and post results , with their specific instructions.
Presumption is that it was indeed build up of scale (but see below). Repeated cleaning cycles seem to have resolved the issue. Moccamaster was responsive to emails. Here is their main response:
Moccamster’s Deep Descaling Treatment
Mix up your descaling solution using room temperature or cold water and the descaler insructions.
If you are using the powder descaler, wait until it is dissolved and then fill your water reservoir.
Turn your brewer on for 30-40 seconds to pull the solution down into the copper heating element and then turn the brewer off.
Let the brewer soak with the solution for a couple of hours then turn your brewer back on to finish brewing the descaling solution.
Run 2-3 water-only rinse brew cycles.
That alone did not do the trick. I repeated it s couple of times. Seeing a slight improvement (more water through the shower head before ir became steam only) I modified the above.
My variation
Fill reservoir with cleaning solution
Turn brewer on, let it run until shower head stops showering water (initially maybe 30 seconds; later on a minute or two)
Turn off and let sit for 20 - 30 minutes
Repeat steps 2 & 3 until tank empty.
Repeat steps 1 thru 4 until the tank clears in one go.
Two or three cycles of this (yes it took a while) seemed to do the trick.
…
Im still puzzled how this happened with regular cleaning cycles, basically when we open a new 100-pack of filters. Our water here, while not soft, is not especially hard.
PS added in reaction to following post.
No sediment or anything in the water out of the cleaning cycles. Early on a very light brown discolouration, but then it always ran clear.
When I was using a Bonavita maker and less meticulous about cleaning (before seeing the clean after every filter pack suggestion here), a deep cleaning like this would yield a rather surprising amount of silvery-gray pebble- and sand-like material. Our water here is not hard.
In July, Amazon had a sale on the Technivorm Moccamaster 79112 for $215.64 so I added one to our collection. You don’t see that price very often. Our other one is over 10 years old so we decided to buy a backup.