CrackAddict wrote:
BTW - as a bit of introduction - I'm a Canadian, married to an American, living in London, UK. As my interest in coffee has grown, I have scaled (no pun intended) my equipment up, but I feel a bit restricted by the knowledge that some day I will move back to the US or Canada and all this 220/240V, 50 Hz equipment will be on eBay. I settled for the Expobar Office Control as it was a very good price in the normally overpriced UK market. (Think same number in GBP as in US$ - about 80% more... for a product made closer to home.)
Perhaps in retrospect, I should have gone with a non-electronic (i.e. lever) controlled machine as it's relatively simple to provide 220V power in a US/CDN residence (like an electric dryer) and only the pump in a lever machine is likely to need to be changed for the North American 60Hz supply. I know - another thread, another time!
I'm having a similar problem with my 3-year-old office control. When making a shot, the pump operates for a long time, but water does not come from the group head. As a temporary fix, after filling the porta-filter with coffee, we run the pump for awhile until water comes out, shut the pump of then we insert the porta-filter and pull the shot. Works very well, but I would like to get this working properly. I suspect a stuck valve somewhere and am reading these posts to figure it out.
I should add that at times, the pump runs for an extremely long time (> 20 seconds) when we first power the machine on in the morning, after the machine has been sitting on, but unused for awhile, or, as I said, when pulling a shot. Note that this is more likely to be true if we haven't made a shot for awhile.
In the meantime, it may interest you to know that I am from the US, and own a 120 v machine. I have been living in Italy for the last 18 months and am using a step-down transformer. The pump has worked fine at 50 hz. It was a risk, but we took the chance and it seems to be fine (apart from this quirky problem we are having as of recently).
Jim De Piante
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