Astoria Argenta water supply Q's

Need help with equipment usage or want to share your latest discovery?
norwood
Posts: 23
Joined: 10 years ago

#1: Post by norwood »

So this Astoria Argenta SAE 2 group kind of followed me home yesterday. Actually, it literally followed me home, since I was in the front of the car and it was in the back. But anyway...

I'm probably going to end up selling or trading it - it's massively too much machine for me, and I love the Rancilio S27 I rebuilt last year from the ground up. But before that, I want to see what kind of shape it's in. The last owners were honest about that they knew pretty much nothing about it. Physically, it appears to be in pretty good shape apart from the missing portafilters (d'oh!) - just kinda dirty, but nothing a good cleaning wouldn't fix.

I have access to a 220v 20amp outlet, so we're actually OK on the power front. What we don't have is a good water supply, because that outlet is in the garage and there's no plumbing there. Which brings me to the first question: how do I supply water to it? I rigged up a way to supply the S27 with water from a 2.5 gallon water bottle, but I wanted to test-run the Astoria from a pasta pot or something similar. However, the fitting underneath it appears to be bigger than 1/4", but smaller than 3/8". Is it some kind of funky metric size? Am I best off just taking the side panel off, detaching the line that brings water to the pump, and feeding it directly with that like we did when we were first testing the S27?

Second, the machine appears to have some kind of bypass to fill the boiler passively, using the pressure of the supply line. Does this mean that unlike the S27, it really *has* to have some supply line pressure instead of just a connection to water that's at the same height as the machine?

Thanks in advance!