Bonnie Brown

By Bonnie Brown

Columnist

Nothing ruins a perfectly good Saturday morning like your coffee maker popping up with the “Descale” message!  You rock along for many weeks or even months between the descaling of your machine.  It’s a real downer when you have to do this.  Not because it’s complicated or difficult.  It’s just a chore I wish I could ignore.  

I have a Cuisinart single-serve coffee machine.  I think this might be my third one.  Once I find something I like, I don’t change my preference.  I know how the buttons and settings all work and there’s something comforting about that.  

However, when the “descale” pops up, I lose all patience and knowledge.  I panic.  You see in order to descale the coffee maker, you have to have plenty of vinegar, or the descaling solution to accomplish this task.  I prefer the vinegar because it’s something I usually have on hand and it’s inexpensive.  And while I usually have vinegar on hand, I try to delay the inevitable descaling ritual.  Could I get another few cups of coffee out of my coffee maker without it tasting like metal or fertilizer?  Can I just simply put this descaling off until tomorrow when I’ve finished my morning coffee?  Would this keep me awake tonight?  Perhaps.  

I’ve read so many reviews about how the descaling should be done and there must be hundreds for my machine alone. I figure I can’t go too far afield with the vinegar rather than the pricey solution which I don’t have on hand.  

So, I try the middle of the road approach and use some of the recommendations that appeal to me.  One must have patience to run the vinegar solution through the machine and allow it to “sit” for the recommended time.  Although truthfully, I let the solution remain in the machine for an hour, give or take, rather than the recommended 4 hours.  Really?  I’m afraid my coffee might taste like tainted vinegar if I let it sit for 4 hours.  

In 2019, I was descaling the machine and had gone through more than a gallon of vinegar and several hours descaling the coffee maker.  I could NOT get the dreadful descale message off the machine.  In desperation and after lots of searching for answers, I called a Cuisinart customer service number and was told to unplug the machine for an hour and that should reset it.  I complied.  The machine, however, did not.  

After another phone call to the customer service number, I talked with a different representative.  Her solution was to hold down the Hot Water and Rinse buttons together.  Really?  That simple?  It was worth a try.  Voila!  It worked.  I suggested to the Customer Service Representative that Cuisinart should include this in the descaling instructions and troubleshooting section.  Don’t think that ever happened.  

I was so relieved to have conquered the descaling monster that I sat down and typed up my experience and the remedy on Fixya.com.  Apparently, there were many others having difficulty and were appreciative that I shared the remedy on-line with them.  I feel like a hero to have cracked the code as to how to remove the message from my machine.  I helped hundreds—no thousands—of people with the remedy I posted. 

Now, on to larger tasks, more repairs, and providing more answers to pesky problems.  But will I take the time to type up any solutions I might stumble upon and post them?  Doubtful.  I’m not really that handy.