Don't clean it so well next time. You need a patina of oxidized copper to prevent continued buildup.

Verdigris has little to do with the hardness of your water. The worst of it is from, as far as I can tell, the boilers sitting empty with just enough water to make a very, very moist environment for them. Think Statue of Liberty; she's made of the same thing (copper). The real bright green verdigris above in your post, Dick, I think that's mostly this stuff.

Then there's also a milder verdigris from, I think, galvanic corrosion that builds up less solidly and thickly but is still kinda nasty:


Really gross puke-green verdigris from after one of my cleanings of the initial crud. (Flickr link)

I'm willing to bet, if you take your cap off after several months, you're going to see something similar to this. I suggest you brush off the hard stuff gently with a bristle brush (I use the metal one that came with my GS3). You want to scrape off the chunks of buildup without scraping off that patina of brownish oxidation, which I think prevents or at least seriously mitigates the effect. Then if it's there, try and wipe out the "muddy" stuff in the top of the grouphead, with a rag, then flush the boiler out with a lot of water (probably a good idea to completely remove the overpressure valve/boiler drain valve).

Do the whole process above a couple of times, say once every 2-3 months, and it should subside dramatically. That has been my experience with it, better every time as that patina builds, and by now I think mine is almost gone. It's been annoying, but ultimately I think it's pretty harmless. I probably don't need to do as much as I have to deal with mine, but I'm rather OCD so it's okay.

Peppersass wrote:
Here's a shot showing how the verdigris went all the way back to the 3-way valve, where it was thickly caked:

Dick, great post and great photos. Did you etch one of your nudes? brave man!

Here's a quick followup. Just after my previous post I went ahead and pulled my cap off and snapped some photos. This is a 2-month followup from my last update, in late May. Back then, as you see, it was almost gone on top. I forgot to take a picture of the inside of the grouphead at the time, but it was overall in pretty good shape-marginally worse than what you see below.


Just a few specks... scraped them off with my nail (Flickr link).


Really pretty clean here, just a little bit of verdigris going on. I think the saga is almost over for me (Flickr link).


This is the screen that Eric S sent me to protect the gicleur (mine is brass) (Flickr link).

I probably need to pull the screen from Eric and clean it up, but I'll wait another few months: it's still working fine, and pulling the TL30 part gets really old.

Anyway, again, while a deep cleaning is probably pretty good to get rid of that bright green verdigris, I think in the future it's best to scrape off any buildup gently to avoid removing any more of the protective patina than necessary.

I want to echo what Nicholas has posted. I think you can try too hard with this problem and in the end just end up making things worse for yourself. During my long saga with my original GS/3, I took the thing apart numerous times (every time because the flow rate had diminished so low [<300ml/min] that I felt forced to do so) and cleaned it scrupulously, to the best of my ability. That usually got me about 5 days to 2 weeks of good service before the thing clogged up again.

My advice to anyone reading this thread would be, first and foremost, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." If your GS/3 has a good flow rate (let's define that as ~400ml/minute or more), then don't take it apart and don't do anything to it other than your normal maintenance. You are NOT going to make it work better than it already works if you have a good flow rate, and I think there is no evidence whatsoever that "preventative maintenance" on this gicleur clogging problem is beneficial. And if there is some verdigris gunk in the grouphead that is causing no problems, who cares? I"m sure that half of what I own is on the verge of crapping out on me, but I'd prefer to be blissfully ignorant of that until "it" fails. As an example, my <2 year old Subaru died a week ago and it turns out it needs a new engine (under warranty). Could I have prevented it from going down this road? I think NOT.

If for some reason you feel compelled to open up the group head and you find a lot of corrosion, I think you should try to differentiate between stable corrosion that is attached to something and loose fragments that might clog the gicleur. Wash away the loose fragments and if you have a good flow rate, leave it at that. If the gicleur is clogged, either clean it out gently so as not to abrade its inner channel (not abrading it, which, I think, makes it more likely to clog later on) or replace it. The part is cheap.

Do as little as possible especially if you have good flow rates. I really believe you can do too much in an attempt to prevent future problems, while in reality causing them unintentionally.

ken

I agree that excessive cleaning of the TL30 tube may lead to re-formation of the green verdigris, and should be avoided if possible. If the deposits can be brushed off, then that's what should be done.

However, I didn't have any choice in the matter. The green deposits on my TL30 tube were quite hard and required lots of soaking in vinegar and scrubbing to remove. Once the greenish-white surface deposits were removed, a very hard, black layer remained. This wasn't what I would call patina -- it was thick and porous. I was concerned that it would provide a substrate for more greenish-white crystals to form. In order to completely remove it, I had to scrub and sand the copper until shiny.

Further, if you look carefully at the photo of the encrusted tube, you can see that the areas not covered with green are quite shiny. Oddly, little if any patina had formed on those areas.

I think we would need a chemist with expertise in copper oxidation to tell us the exact cause of the verdigris formation. A little Googling on the subject reveals that there are several forms of copper oxidation. Exposure to air leads to the ultra-thin, uniform brown layer you see on most household pipes. I think this is what has now formed on Nicholas's TL30 tube and it may be protecting the tube from further green verdigris formation. Exposure to moisture can lead to other forms of oxidation, including the green patina on the Statue of Liberty. There are three constituents of this patina, and the exact proportions determine what the patina looks like. One of them happens to be malachite, a copper carbonate. I'm suspicious that this may be the form that leads to the large green crystals found on my TL30 tube. I'm also suspicious that the chemical composition of the water may indeed play a role in determining the consitutuents of the green substance.

Perhaps high alkalinity in cation-softened water, which Nicholas, Ken and I all used, may play a role, along with exposure to air and some sort of galvanic reaction between the copper and other metals in the group. It may also be the case that some GS3s were made with brand-new shiny copper TL30 tubes, which were less resistant to formation of the green stuff, and others were made with older copper tubes that had some brown patina that protected them.

One question is why did a significant amount of large green crystaline material end up at the rim of the group cap? What attracted them there? Evidently, they ate away at the chrome plating. Why? As I recall, this effect was particulalry bad under Nicholas's group cap, leading him to remove all of the plating down to the brass.

Another question is, why do some areas of my TL30 appear to be plated? On further reflection (no pun intended), I believe most of these areas were under heavy deposits of verdigris. I'm wondering if they're shiny because they contain chrome that disolved off the group cap. Perhaps particles of chrome combined somewhow with malachite to form the base layer that adhered to the pipe, and when I scrubbed/sanded/buffed them they turned shiny. I'm pretty sure there were shiny areas not covered with any verdigris, so maybe that's the base layer before the green stuff gets deposited.

It's encouraging that the brown patina on Nicholas's TL30 seems to be resisting further formation of the green crystals. I do wonder, however, if this has been helped by his switching from cation-softened water to Claris-blended water with lower alkalinity.

I drain my boilers once a month (as recommended by LM), so I'll probably pop the group cap at the same time to keep tabs on the TL30 and brush off any loose deposits as soon as they form.

networkcrasher wrote:Dick, great post and great photos. Did you etch one of your nudes? brave man!

How very observant of you . Yes, I took a deep breath and etched marks for 1oz, 1.5oz and 2oz.

You know, back in my Dad's day, etching nudes had a whole different connotation (i.e., "Would you like to come up to my apartment and see my etchings?")

The replacement TL30 that LM sent me was plated and silverish in color; I don't know what the plating material was, but it looked like chrome. I was told by LM that the plating was new and a redesign (perhaps in response to reports of corrosion). I now own a paddle version which has a significantly higher flow rate than my old regular GS/3 had, and this has not diminished. The plumbing is however quite a bit different.

I think it is quite possible that plating this TL30 part will solve the problems that have been reported here, although Nicholas' experience shows that it can resolve on its own.

I follow owners manuals and manufacturer's instructions when they make sense. I think it is important to change the water in the boilers, especially in the steam boiler, as minerals will accumulate over time, especially if the steam boiler is used mostly for steam, and not for "Tea" water. The brew boiler has a constant changeover of water as it is used in brewing and pure steam is not being emitted, making the brew boiler less of an issue.

I do not think it is necessary or even necessarily advisable to empty out the boilers monthly. I do think the steam boiler needs a bit more attention in this regard than does the brew boiler as above. Every time I do a chemical backflush (around 1x a week, occasionally 2x a week) I drain about a liter out of the "Tea" valve. I believe this provides more than enough changeover in the steam boiler water to prevent minerals accumulation. I would consider opening up the machine and draining the steam boiler every 6 months to a year, but in home service I can see no point in doing it more frequently (although I did do this once a month or more often with my original GS/3, and have now decided this is not worth doing). You risk getting burned when you drain the steam boiler, and if it ain't broke, why fix it?

ken

Peppersass wrote:How very observant of you . Yes, I took a deep breath and etched marks for 1oz, 1.5oz and 2oz.

You know, back in my Dad's day, etching nudes had a whole different connotation (i.e., "Would you like to come up to my apartment and see my etchings?")

Well, I have both the "old" and "new" nudes, so when I see them, I tend to notice.

I think it still has a whole different connotation today! Almost a dialect with respect to espresso!

I really, really doubt it that the water change improves it. I've been using Claris since September 2009, and I pulled my group cap for the first time in mid-November of 2009.

The first time I opened it, IIRC, I had something close to what Ken posted, with the light pastel blue verdigris that I've never really seen since I first cleaned the machine. Here's the relevant post. As I said there, though, even after the initial modest cleanup I got lots of buildup where the chrome would flake off and expose raw brass on the cap.

I wanted to get the cap clean of chrome so I scraped it down thoroughly and exposed a lot of bare brass:


Clean-ish after a heavy brushing with the machine's included bristle brush (flickr).

That didn't work so well for me (at the time I was on Claris, of course).


Gross, but at least it seems almost totally isolated to the chrome flecks I couldn't sand out. (Flickr link)

After scraping that out, about 6 weeks later I got this:



Wasn't till May, several months after that, that the effect dramatically curtailed, and then just last night as I posted previously, it's really doing better.

My hypothesis that the really light green-blue statue-of-liberty stuff like Ken and I as well as many others have found when opening their brew boilers for the first time is from having the boiler drained and exposed to really humid air may be wrong, and it may have to do with the water formulation, but it's clear to me from my experience that the effect can still happen (albeit different shades, above) with Claris-softened water as well as more typical salt-rechargeable softeners.

I'm looking forward to finding out your experience over the next several months if you decide to keep an eye on things, Dick.

I have a 1yr old (ownership time) GS3v which was part of the "fire-sale" group.

After ~4 months, I also started to see flowrate reductions and eventual gicelur clogging (~5 times in next 4 months).

When opened, I also saw the veridigris, as reported by many others, particularly around the TL30.

Like Ken, I was getting particularly frustrated with the repeated flow failures. LM Roger mentioned during one of my rants that a new, Cr-plated TL30 was available, but he had no feedback on the part at that time.

I have been using this new part for 4-5 months now, with no significant flow reductions.

I opened the group last after about three months of use and didn't see any singificant surface buidlup, either on the TL30 or elsewhere.

I can only speak for my experience, but I would encourage those having repeated issues to try the plated TL30. It seems to be working well for me.

Kevin @ LM can help getting the part to you.