When you say "unscrew the cap from the group," I'm not exactly sure what that is.

Its the "bolt" at the top of the illustration below.

This would give you some indication of any scale buildup internal to the machine - not exactly 100% translatable in "grey" areas but if the group internals are pristine, its likely your machine is in good shape.

As an alternative, set your pstat to 1.0 bar max on a fully warmed up machine. Now open the steam valve 100% and discharge (submerged, obviously) into a pitcher of water. While doing this for a minute or so, what does your boiler pressure reading fall to? Post this result and other Elektra owners can compare.

Take some pics of your boiler top (and post same) and someone can advise what to remove to check your water level and the condition of your water level sensor. High water levels can diminish steaming power also.

stevendouglas wrote:
I assume you mean disconnect at the water source and drop that in the bucket so that the pump will take a suction on the citric acid? Also, I thought the rotary pump needed positive head at the inlet is this not true, will it take a suction from the bucket? Or do you put the acid bucket above the inlet of the pump?

Finally, is it safe to assume the acid will damage any chrome parts that it touches?

Thanks for your help!

Steve

A rotary pump will draw water without positive pressure. Jut put the bucket on the floor and drop the hose in.

Citric acid, 2 tablespoons per gallon of water, but dont get ahead of yourself. If you remove that cap and it is in good shape, it may not be necessary.

If you soaked the chrome parts in the acid, it could remove the chrome, but the acid is inside the machine/boiler/pipes. A splash will not do any harm on the outside. As to sourcing it, look up home beer brewing stores in the phone book. They will carry food grade citric acid.

Thanks for the help. I shot this video this morning just to show the steam flow when I pull my first shot in the morning. I'll cool it down and then get some pictures of the internal with the cap removed. Thanks again for the help. That's a great cutaway of the group.



Is it possible that there is air in the line? I haven't opened up the system, but it seems as though there is little actual steam blowing out. I noticed that when I pull the tip off too. Even with the tip removed the boiler pressure drops no lower than about 1.0 bar. It's just a thought.




More to follow.

Steve

Shut down, cooled down, and SCALED...badly scaled. I think I've found the problem. I'll descale the A3 this week. I'm ashamed to show these. Thanks for your help. I'll let you know how the descale goes.









I assume this will mean a longer soak for the descaling and maybe a couple of runs through it?

Thanks again,
Steve

On the plus side, you know what's going wrong. Flush once, take a look, repeat until it looks clean or you like the steaming action.

Mark

The green stuff is copper oxide, has nothing to do with your water quallity. Look at the jet, it's clean - no scale at all. No need to descale, just flush out the copper oxide.
The steam power problem must be in the valve or in the copper line towards the boiler. Maybe it's the rubber valve seal that is deformed a lot. Descaling will not help for this problem. Clean it by hand, it's not hard to do.
Frank

+1.

Descaling also won't help if milk got sucked back into the line.

You defiantly have a steam issue. The overall shape does not look to bad but I would still run a descale personally. That will clean it all up but you will probably still need to open up the valve assembly to check it out.

Thanks to everyone who provided comments. I just thought I'd provide a quick summary of how this turned out.

I descaled the machine (not as hard as I thought it would be), but the steam flow was still weak.

I then took pipe cleaners to everything between the steam tip and the boiler. It's very easy to disassemble everything. After shut down and cool down:

1. Remove the steam wand.
2. Remove the steam valve.
3. Remove the pipe between the boiler and the back of the front panel.
4. Take pipe cleaners to everything. I doubled the pipe cleaners a number of times to make sure I was cleaning it out good.
5. Reassemble
6. Turn it on heat it up and Sha-Zaam!!! More steam than I knew what to do with - honestly, I almost blew the milk out of the pitcher.

Thanks again for all the advice and help. This is what makes HB such a great place.

Steve

Good to hear that you are back in the steaming like a locomotive business.

Did the pipe cleaner pull out a ton of stuff from one of the pipes?

Mark