good afternoon YouTube so I've been using this as Cal descaling powder in my Breville barista
express coffee machine so I picked this up two years ago off of Amazon I'll put a link to this
this works pretty good about seventeen dollars for the whole bottle I've used half of it in two
years and that's descaling the espresso machine about once a month and I use approximately one
ounce as you can see there's my instructions I use 1/8 of a cup or one ounce 28 to 30 milliliters of
powder or 2 tablespoons that's how much is in there individual packets if you buy the stuff
prepackaged if I had used white vinegar which I started using you use a quart of vinegar per
cycle and in a year I would use three gallons of vinegar and at 350 to $4 a gallon you're looking
at 11 or 12 dollars per year for vinegar this has been two years maybe four dollars a year for
this powder so quite a bit more economical but this works out to seventeen dollars a kilogram
and I went went to their website here's the safety data sheet does scale descaler and the
ingredient citric acid about 60 percent self emitting acid or also known as self amick acid
and that's about 5% and then aluminum sulfate about 1% that adds up to about two-thirds of
the material sixty-six percent these things here don't cost anywhere near $17 a kilogram
in fact right here I bought 25 pounds of citric acid for about $50 delivered and let's see that
came from the chemistry connection I'll put a link to this in the video description you're
looking at $2 a pound for this then you got some sulfa me a sedan Daffy pounds this was
about $13 so you're looking at maybe $63 and then there's some aluminum sulfate this was two pounds
I think it was around $10 let's go back here and look here so you know if you look at this
it's about 60 parts citric acid five parts self amick acid and then one part aluminum
sulfate if you ignore the other third over here whatever that is that's about a 12 to one ratio
so with 25 pounds I would want about 2 pounds of this so I think two and a half that's about
1 in 10 if you take one sixtieth of 25 pounds I think a half a pound of aluminum sulfate would
basically make this and one of the reasons I'm making this instead of buying this bottle like
this so I want to use this in my espresso machine so I need about 12 ounces per year I also want to
use this in my tankless water heater and for that I'm gonna need to make up about two and a half
three gallons of descaling liquid and I'll need something like 10 or 12 ounces of this compound
here so I'd use pretty close to a full bottle of this in a year to get so that the net cost
here is about $70 for all the materials and I'm gonna make about 28 pounds so that's what maybe
two dollars fifty cents a pound roughly and maybe five dollars a kilogram so it's about a third the
price of this okay yeah it is just a large bag so what I figure I'm gonna do I picked up Home Depot
buckets gasket sealing lid because I want to keep this air tight so that it doesn't absorb moisture
citric acid 25 pounds this is food grades if your acid this is food grade self emic acid
food grade aluminum sulfate so I made sure to get the food grade because I'm gonna be using this in
my espresso machine okay so I've got my dust mask and safety glasses on keep this powder out of my
eyes also working outside so hopefully the breeze will keep the dust down a little bit of self amick
acid I want to kind of mix this in layers so it's is this gonna be kind of hard to see how well you
mix it because everything's a white powder so I weighed out eight ounces of the aluminum sulfate
so I'll put that in there figure out try my drill here okay guess lather rinse and repeat
the citric acid that's the rest of the cell family I said sulfate okay I think I need a bigger mixer
get down there deeper so this is like a paint mixer in my cordless drill and I'm on low speed
yeah find it works better if you run this in Reverse
kind of pulls the material up and mixes it better
okay I think that's gonna do it we've got got ourselves about 28 pounds of pomade des cow just
like this same ingredients here so I think with this you are using approximately 30 milliliters
or one ounce for one quart or one liter of water but since this is about one third filler or the
active ingredients are about two thirds you'd probably want to use something like two thirds
of an ounce or twenty milliliters per liter or quart of water so this is a little more
concentrated because I don't have any fillers in it and then the nice thing I like about this
over white vinegar or one is it works better who is it's less expensive and then the third one is
this was two years worth of use that would be six gallon jugs of white vinegar and then another six
gallons so you know and in my hand I'm holding the equivalent of twelve gallons of white vinegar it's
a lot easier to store this here I'm gonna have maybe twenty into twenty years worth of powder
so yeah I just thought I'd show you my des Cal substitute here homemade do-it-yourself descaling
powder so I'm gonna put the lid back on here I think what I'll do is keep this inside destroy
kind of remember my recipe and I might also keep keep this in here - we just saw remember where
this is you it also isn't good soil acidifier if you have plants like blueberries or azaleas plants
that need acidic soil this is a good soil attitude so I was looking up what these different compounds
do so both of these acids are what dissolved the calcium and lime scale that builds up in either
your espresso machine or your water heater and I guess they use comics of acids g/b citric acid
is better at dissolving one kind of scale and sulfur Makassar is better at a different kind
this aluminum sulfate on some of the coffee machine forums people think the aluminum is
to protect things like aluminum parts in your machine now des cal recommends not using this on
any machine with aluminum and I don't think most machines have much aluminum parts inside you know
they're usually copper or stainless steel like the tankless heater is copper or brass stainless
steel and I think the the espresso machine is similar but what the aluminum sulfate seems to
be used for at least industrial ii it's used in water treatment plants places where they're
working with things dissolved in water and apparently the aluminum sulfate helped bind
to dissolved minerals so these acids dissolve things like calcium carbonate and your slime
and scale buildup they dissolve that this aluminum sulfate bonds with those DES minerals causes them
to precipitate and clump together so that those materials either sink to the bottom or float to
the surface depending on what they're consisting of but anyway there's my homemade version of death
scale probably about a third the price of the big bottle it should work just as well a little more
concentrated here since I'm not doing the 33% other stuff that's not an active ingredient so
yeah if you have any questions about that go ahead and post up in the comment section down below I'll
try using this in the coffee machine when I next need to descale it and then in the next video
we'll take a look at using this in the tankless water heater see how it works there so stay tuned
for that video if you haven't already done so you can subscribe with the link in the lower
right corner I'll put those other videos over here on the left side and as always thanks for watching