Any particular stuff I should use – is one brand better than the others?

Gaggia do their own stuff in little sachets.

No idea if it’s better than others.

Happydonkey.co.uk will sell you all the stuff you need, including puly caff and a blind basket for backflushing. All that backflushing sounds rubbish to me though.

But I just take the opportunity of taking off the shower plate and the shower block (just undo the 2 allen bolts and prise it off) and de-gunking it all manually, and running ordinary descaler through.

Last time I left it so long that bits of scale dislodged and got stuck in the works, but poking about with a cocktail stick sorted it.

I just bought a new rubber seal, shower screen and cleaning brush from happy donkey – well worth it.

I use the Gaggia stuff about once every six months. As we live in a hard water area we have a Breville kettle that has the Brita water softening system built in. I always fill the Gaggia using water that’s been through the kettle filter to avoid scaling up the Gaggia.

eekk.. hard water area too. not descaled in 2 years :s

I heard once that there is a coating on the boiler that is damaged by most descalers – so go for the Gaggia one. No idea if the claim was true – I’ve always put filtered water in so never descaled mine.

soft Scottish water, no need to de scale here 🙂

Filtered water. Now that makes sense. I’ll descale then look into getting some Gaggia descaler.

Muchos gracias.

puly caff works for me, mind you I live in T’ north so soft water here

But do what bigjohn said as well – take off the plate and the stuff behind it. All the sticky oils in the coffee make a residue that is nothing to do with whether the water is hard or not and the descaler does not touch it. It’s very simple but if I remember correctly there are good instructions on the Gaggia website