Hey there. I was recently adjusting the water level in my boiler and remembered your question. The water level should be just above half way. The way to do this is to lift the pin higher out of the boiler - it took a good adjustment to get the additional water level set in my boiler. If you do this and water is not filling up, then your auto-fill functions may not be working properly, or your machine might not work quite how mine does. My machine is working well, we pulled a bunch of espresso on it the other night.

I had to clean the hell out of the E-61 group head as well. I took it off, soaked and scrubbed it down. I also converted the dispersion screen to one that I can unscrew instead of having to remove the gasket every time. I'm just working on backflushing the machine really well every time I use it to hopefully clean out all the dirt in the machine from years of neglect..

Hope things are working out for you with the machine.

--Jon