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I wondered about this after seeing your post and long story short, descalers actually create a chemical reaction that changes the scale to another chemical altogether. Looks like it depends on what kind of descalers you use. Vinegar will react to scale differently than a citric acid based descaler.
But limescale and is soluble. So it will dissolve in water (especially cold water). Given that I would imagine it's not the best idea to reuse a deacaling solution more than maybe twice.
Thanks for the feedback. I figure it can’t hurt to experiment. Every time the machine starts coughing and sputtering, I’ll make a couple passes with used descaling solution. Guess I should keep track of how many iterations I use it. When it fails to work, I’ll make a fresh batch. I might experiment with doing the 1st pass with used solution and a 2nd pass with new (or newer) solution.
BTW, that Cloudflare link you gave is a booby-trap of dark patterns. It gave a blocking cookie popup with no “reject all” option to Tor Browser and an endless list of cookie switches to toggle, so I tried lynx. It gave a 403 claiming “enable javascript and cookies to continue” to Lynx. Then I loaded the archive version in Firefox with js and animations both disabled, and I could finally read the text (very useful and far deeper than I can comprehend). But then an animation at the bottom played anyway. I had to disable still images to stop the animation (guessing the ad is an animated GIF).
What a disasterous display of web enshitification.. anyway, I hope this helps someone.
One of the interesting points that was made is different machines have different components, so it’s best to use the manufacturer recommended descaling solution. Which I assume would also be commercially biased. I hope one day the #rightToRepair will require a disclosure of the materials in the machine and chemical requirements (as opposed to brand requirements).
update
That page inspired me to create a new community: “Asshole Design: Web Edition” :).
You aren't wrong. The web page itself is badly put together but the info was interesting and useful.
I use ublock origin and have a pihole so I didn't see everything you did apparently. Sorry for the shadiness of the link.
Yeah indeed it was very useful information on a shit website. This is increasingly common. I’m always looking for a tech solution to this problem that is not user-specific. Advanced users can solve it for themselves to some extent using advanced tools. And sometimes that backfires.. if the website is particularly user-hostile advanced tools can worsen the UX.