Well said Chris

cdeck wrote:Both copper and stainless boilers will outlive me.

With that kind of perspective on things what would we ever talk about on here

mike guy wrote:Something I think we're overlooking is that these steels are regulated as food service products. We should be able to put this to bed. ...

Not really. Many espresso machines sold do not carry NSF certification - unless they are intended for commercial use. Offhand, in the consumer/prosumer space, I can only think of Nuova Simonelli and La Marzocco certifying their products that are (also) aimed at consumers for NSF compliance. Note that I'm not saying that other machines don't meet the standards; just that they aren't certified as being tested by a recognized third-party to meet the relevant standards. (As an aside, a lot of machines will carry a CE mark, which is not recognized as a certification mark in North America.)

OldNuc wrote:Stainless steel types 304/304L and 316/316L are the gold standard for food processing and cooking material. There is a small/minor issue with very low pressure temperature boiler service life when water chemistry is being completely ignored. Formulating designer water to compensate for coffee defects and or water supply defects without consideration of boiler water chemistry requirements may lead to problems.
Brass, copper, and bronze have a long successful history as well but do require a tighter boiler water chemistry control.

Maybe this is why Breville uses water conditioners in their espresso designs.

The Breville "water conditioner" is nothing but a small sack of resin beads for water softening. My wife bought a Breville Keurig cup machine at a yard sale, (finicky and full of issues, but does work), that uses the same exact system... Same sack of beads with same clip to hold it. Breville says to replace monthly.

I'm not sure I would call such a system much of a "conditioner". It doesn't add beneficial chemicals or alter the pH any more than any other resin bead softener. And bead sack is so small, I have my doubts as to how well it works.

-Peter

It appears to me that the ECM and Profitec boilers are 18/8 or 18/10 Stainless. I was watching this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hunFv7E51L8#t=114 on the Syncronika thread. At 3:10 to 3:12 they removed the boiler insulation and numbers are visible from manufacturing. They are ..5 EN10217-7 1.43... Being the curious person I am I googled the numbers and came up with this page http://www.bssa.org.uk/topics.php?article=344 . It looks like the boilers started out life as stainless steel pressure tubing before being cut to size and welded into boilers. The 1.43 number is missing a couple of digits which would tell exactly what it is. the EN number looks to me like an industry standard that it meets.

And now Prairiedawg becomes super DetectiveDawg.

Nice work.

+1 !!

We now know that at least profitec/ECM use 304. As was assumed, there would really be no reason to use anything else and cheap out on something like this. If I find an excuse to open up the synchronika I'll unwrap the boiler and get the rest of the part number, but the difference between 18/8 and 18/10 should be pretty minimal and just splitting hairs.

I'm not surprised they re-purposed pressure tubing. Seems like a good idea.