Rancilio Epoca issue

I open up the wand and it shoots streams of water for several seconds. It finally purges, and steam comes out, but it pulses, and continues to mix more water in the steam. Doesn't do so well when you're texturing milk and adding water to it. The boiler is currently at about 1.1 bar. 

Read on if you want back-story.

This is really irking me. I just opened a new location in my home town, effectively closing our last place because it was a terrible spot to be. I didn't own any of the espresso equipment at our old location. But, it just so happened that I had enough espresso equipment that I purchased for a hospital kiosk deal that fell through a year before. When we received the epoca it was 5 years old, but in excellent condition (from what we could tell). The previous owner had babied it and deep cleaned it daily. 

Before we opened, we sent the machine down to Fortuna coffee shop solutions located in Greensboro, NC for refurbishing and tuning. We get it back, hook it up, and since opening it has been functioning at an excellent condition providing us great shots and texturing milk better than our previous machine which was a much newer Astoria. We have been open at our new location since May 29th.

About a month ago, the cleaning spout wouldn't release water and just pumped out steam, and our machine began to over-heat and automatically shut down. I called up Fortuna and they came running...in which the promptly took the case off and reset the breaker. All fixed! Right? Wrong.... They left, and it instantly started again. I talk to a different person there and he says the water level is too low and the elements are overheating. They come back a day or two later and swapped machines to work on it. Okay, so they had it for about a week. They said they went in and cleaned everything really well...said it was doing fine. One of the guys always takes a moment to trash my espresso machine and tell me how cheap it is. Usual encounter. 

I get it back. It's not over heating now. But it is still giving me irregular steam and now the wands are releasing excess amounts of condensed water. I call them back. "Oh, now it's too full." They step me through the process of how to adjust the water level. I do it. I've done it now, several times. Still the same problem.

You need to be a member of Barista Exchange to add comments!

Join Barista Exchange

Email me when people reply –