Many home lever machines share one thing in common with steam toy espresso makers: you fill the boiler directly. There is no water reservoir or plumbed water inlet. This allows you to jump start the machine by pouring preheated water into the boiler, thereby reducing warmup times.


My $10 Amazon electric kettle. More pricey models keep water at brew temperature all day long.

I tried this on two levers that I'm testing for the Lever Smackdown: the La Pavoni Europiccola (0.8L boiler) and the Elektra Micro Casa a Leva (1.8L boiler). Using cold Brita-filtered water, the 1000W Pavoni heats up in 6-7 minutes, and the 850W Elektra takes 11-12 minutes to reach 1.0 bar pressure. Using boiling water, the Elektra took only 6 minutes, and the Pavoni was up to temperature in just 3 minutes.

Although not a big deal for me, I regularly see posts from people asking about espresso machines that heat up quickly. With an electric hot water kettle that maintains water at boiling, you can be ready to brew espresso in as little as 3 minutes.

We have hot filtered water on tap at work and I do this frequently to save some warmup time, works great.

my elektra is at temp in 12 minutes.
my wife uses a kettle for her tea. assuming i boil around 1 liter of water, it will take around 4 minutes in the kettle. that will save me 2 minutes.

now, if we could just find a way to have pressurized 195F water come right out of the tap, all we need to do is screw a PF onto the spigot

LeoZ wrote:my elektra is at temp in 12 minutes.
my wife uses a kettle for her tea. assuming i boil around 1 liter of water, it will take around 4 minutes in the kettle. that will save me 2 minutes.

You can save a bit more time by filling the Elektra with half the water and turning it on, while boiling the rest of the water in a kettle. (Parallel processing, woohoo. ) But I agree, this is more of a curiosity than anything else. And somewhat unique to levers.

John...may be it's an old wives tale, but I've always heard that boiling water reduces the oxygen contact somewhat, thereby producing water that is so-called "flat"...pre-boiling, you'd be, in essence boiling it twice....
Maybe because I'm self employed, and work a whole lot in my studio at home, 7 minutes ain't no big deal...I can check email, make an omelet, unload the dish washer, etc....
Guess folks who actually "work" for a living have it tougher in the morning!

IMAWriter wrote:John...may be it's an old wives tale, but I've always heard that boiling water reduces the oxygen contact somewhat, thereby producing water that is so-called "flat"...pre-boiling, you'd be, in essence boiling it twice....
Maybe because I'm self employed, and work a whole lot in my studio at home, 7 minutes ain't no big deal...I can check email, make an omelet, unload the dish washer, etc....
Guess folks who actually "work" for a living have it tougher in the morning!

If that's true, one could always just stop it before it boils. And, if you do the "trick" where you boil half in the machine and half in the kettle (I always did this), the water in the boiler is already going in the boiler when your pour the rest in... so the kettle water never really stops boiling...

Still, I am sure there is something to be said for using the freshest water. HX is nice in that regard as it is all flash-heated fresh on demand.

RapidCoffee wrote:You can save a bit more time by filling the Elektra with half the water and turning it on, while boiling the rest of the water in a kettle. (Parallel processing, woohoo. ) But I agree, this is more of a curiosity than anything else. And somewhat unique to levers.

you make it sound like 2 mins is a bad thing to save

One thing that I always liked about this idea, as a matter of convenience, was that I would use the excess kettle water to warm my cup(s) and also sanitize my cleaning rag after filling the boiler. I felt like this was pretty useful.