Burner0000 wrote:Others may hate me for saying this but I think the Silvia is a good bet. I am also a single drinker in the house and it's perfect. If you learn to temp surf or get a PID and your using a good grinder it can produce great shots!

Hate? No. Disagree? Yes.

Rich

If your considering an HX machine then forget single boilers. The Silvia or CC1 will produce a good shot but a larger HX will beat it. Single boilers have poor temp stability during extraction and waiting on steam with espresso already brewed will start to degrade as Rich was saying. I would shop for a solid grinder first then decide on your espresso machine. I should have posted previously.. The Silvia is IMO a solid machine but out dated. Don't pay more than $400 for one.

Although Bill Crossland has the highest of respect from the espresso community, I was weary of its CC1 because idrinkcoffee.com stopped carrying it due to reliability issues.

I had a Silvia but ditched it for a la pavoni. Now that I think of it, the only reason I post on these boards is to promote the La Pavoni.

The Silvia was a nice machine. It felt really solid and once I learned to temp surf it produced wonderful shots. The reason I went with a lever machine was the smaller foot print, the ability to service it myself and a certain je ne sais quois.

I have this theory that this certain something is what made the e61 grouphead so popular. In some C shaped espresso machines you can't see the area underneath the overhanging thing. It's uncomfortable. It's not that I think there are spiders or ghosts or something, but it's just not a beautiful design.

Now I don't think that levers are for everybody, or else you'd get many more lever advocates, but I honestly can't think of a reason why someone who makes one espresso at a time would go for anything else.

Burner0000 wrote:If your considering an HX machine then forget single boilers. The Silvia or CC1 will produce a good shot but a larger HX will beat it. Single boilers have poor temp stability during extraction <snip>

A far as I can tell from all the testing, HXs are not stable at all during the shot. It's the repeatability between shots that they're good at.