What Your Machine's Manual Says About Water

Your manual is the rule book, and everything on this site comes second to it. Breville's support article says it directly: always follow the water, filtration, and descaling recommendations in the instruction manual for your specific machine.¹

Finding it

Look for the model name on the machine, usually on a label or the base. Then search the maker's support site for that exact name. A maker's own manual, downloaded from its own site, is the version to trust.

De'Longhi's support page, for one, points owners to a place to download the user instructions.² Many makers do something similar. If you bought a machine secondhand, the model name is how you get the right booklet.

Which sections to read

Skim the contents for these words:

• Water, water quality or water hardness
• Descaling, decalcifying or scale
• Filter, cartridge or water softening
• Tank, filling and cleaning

Put a sticky note on those pages. You'll come back to them.

What the terms usually mean

Hardness level. A setting you enter so the machine knows how often to ask for descaling. De'Longhi says the setting determines how regularly you will need to descale.³ For its fully automatic machines, a strip result is read as a scale that starts at soft and ends at hard.² The units page shows how that scale relates to numbers.

Alternative water source. Some models recommend changing to an alternative water source when the measured hardness is particularly high.¹ That could mean filtered or bottled water, depending on what your manual lists.

Little or no mineral content. A warning that appears in some manuals. Breville names distilled water, demineralized water and heavily filtered water among the types to avoid.¹ Your manual may state its own list, so read it.

Filter. A cartridge that sits in the tank. What a maker says about cartridges and their schedules is worth reading in your manual too, since the words differ from one brand to the next.

Why makers disagree

They don't have to match. Each machine has its own boiler, valves and sensors. De'Longhi says the steps for setting hardness differ between its machines, and it sends owners to the user manual.³ A rule for one model can be wrong for another.

So don't copy a setting from a forum post or a friend's machine. Don't copy it from this site either. Read your own page.

Putting it to use

Test your water at home, or look it up from your supplier's report. Then compare the result with the table in your manual.

If a manual says nothing clear about water, ask the maker's support team. That's a better route than guessing, and it keeps any warranty questions simple. For anything involving the inside of the machine, leave it to the maker or a qualified technician.