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Article of the day - Articles courtesy: www.dynamic-descaler.com
  Water scale on any heat transfer surface reduces the
effectiveness of that heat transfer. This results in reduced
equipment efficiency while increasing energy consumption,
increasing costs and even increasing plant downtime. Often this
"buildup" problem is either ignored or relegated to "fixing it
at the last minute or upon mechanical failure" status because of
downtime costs. This is historically based
on the premise that to descale takes a
great deal of time.
Cleaning can be done either mechanically or with the use of chemicals. Mechanical cleaning obviously takes a great deal of downtime because to mechanically clean, you need to dismantle equipment. There is also the replacement of gaskets and seals adding to the cost. In addition, mechanical cleaning does not always get "all" the scale out. Chemical cleaning can get at scale buildup not always reachable in mechanical cleaning. However, five other concerns need to be addressed with chemical cleaning:
There are dozens of chemicals on the market that can descale. However, some can be prohibitively expensive to use in large applications, or very weak and slow so the problem of downtime still remains a major issue. It is very important that any descaler is not just an inhibited acid - many companies supply only that. But they tend to be slow, and often do not remove all the scale deposits since deposits can consist of calcium combined with rust, silica, oil, and whatever else can be in a water system. A descaling chemical should have adequate and quality detergents to remove such deposits. Inhibited acid alone will often not even touch some deposits.
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Many products claim low or negligible corrosions rates but
often meet that claim by simply supplying a slow, and weak,
heavily diluted acid. In this case the customer is buying
essentially expensive water. At the other extreme you may
actually have a relatively good descaler that makes ridiculous
claims of no corrosion at all. One such product that claimed no
corrosion (and apparently continues to do so) once had a rather
unpleasant interaction with the Ontario Ministry of Labour some
years ago. So be very careful of such claims.
Having said the above, there are some good products available. A good descaler: