Just received my La Pavoni.

Now i need links for the following mods / parts swaps.

-Temperature Gauge
-Pressure Gauge
-Bottomless portafilter

Since my tamping is perfectly consistent for my Silvia, I think going bottomless here is gonna help a lot for diagnosing the grind, dose and tamp

While temperature gauges help with knowing exactly how hot counts, Too high temp: Over-Extracted, Too low temp: Under-Extracted.

Dialling in the temp is good but i will need a pressure gauge to practice pulling at the correct pressure.

Thanks.

LMGTFU or use the Search feature. You'll find these things quickly if you just look.

+1 can we delete this thread?

I'm fine with giving a new member a chance to learn how our site works. To the OP, after you search please feel free to respond with more specific questions.

I agree with the above posters the pavoni is an extremely well documented and modified machine. But whenever I search for answers sometimes the post with the best answer has the usual look it up responses as the first few posts.

Anyhow you don't need a temp gauge. The pressure Gauge will tell you all you need to know. The idea with the pavoni is that the Water is superheated under pressure and cools in its path to piston chamber. The variation in temperature is due to the variance in the temperature of the bell and piston. Adding thermometers to this is non trivial. Stickers are available but are not great.

You can get an adapter to attach a pressure gauge to your Europiccola from espresso care. You can also get a naked portafilter from there but it's really expensive. Chopping your own is the most common route.

The pressure gauge on the boiler will tell you the boiler temperature, as juanitowu said above.

However,

TheJavaCup77 wrote:Dialling in the temp is good but i will need a pressure gauge to practice pulling at the correct pressure.

I think the OP was wanting a brew pressure gauge.

Brew pressure gauges are not used on lever machines. On a manual lever, your arm is the gauge, you can feel if it's a soft or hard pull. And the great thing about them is that you can give it any pressure you want, especially with a bottomless you will adjust your force as you watch the flow.

If you want to get a feel for how hard is hard, you can put a bathroom scale under the machine and experiment a little with a very tight shot. Around 9 bar will be around 30 lbs on the scale (calculation can be found here: Pulling force for La Pavoni Europiccola .) Pulling more than that is generally counterproductive. Another guide about how hard to pull is that it should be like drawing a knife through cold butter. I find that a little hard to interpret. Once you spend a few minutes and learn what ~40 lbs of force feels like, then you will know what a too-hard pull is.

juanitowu wrote:
Anyhow you don't need a temp gauge. The pressure Gauge will tell you all you need to know. The idea with the pavoni is that the Water is superheated under pressure and cools in its path to piston chamber. The variation in temperature is due to the variance in the temperature of the bell and piston. Adding thermometers to this is non trivial. Stickers are available but are not great.

I dont' agree. I would say: Anyhow you don't need a pressure gauge. The temperature Gauge will tell you all you need to know. The problem with the pavoni is that the Water is superheated under pressure and cools in its path to piston chamber, but if the piston chamber is too hot then the brew water is too hot. The variation in temperature is due to the variance in the temperature of the bell and piston and if the bell and piston are too cool even when the boiler is at pressure, then the shot is sour or underextracted, blah. Adding thermometers to this is quite simple. $12 or so for a digital thermometer, with a method well documented by drgary and others on a separate thread.

I do agree that temperature strip stickers are available but are not great.

It all depends how much repeatability and control you want. Both the boiler pressure and the grouphead temperature interact to produce the actual brewing temperature, so using the same pressure from shot to shot won't actually guarantee similar results in the cup. With the combination of a pressure gauge and a precise measurement of group temperature, you will be able to dial in new coffees to best effect more quickly and stick closely to your chosen profile thereafter. If you are guessing about either boiler pressure or group temperature, you will be introducing some uncontrolled variance into your shots.

[creative nickname] has it correct. The La Pavoni operates as a saturated system, there is NO superheat ever. Unless the machine is left on for a long period f time the group temperature will be below the saturation temperature if the non condensible gases have been vented off, how much below is a time dependent function. The longer the machine sets at the p-stat setpoint pressure the closer the group will come to matching the saturation temperature. You need either a personally tested routine which is time dependent to control shot temperature or both a pressure gauge and thermometer. Using the thermometer allows controlling how much cooling is obtained from external means, Flushing ~250F water through the group is not going to cool it either.

I agree that the most control would be to pull a shot at a measured group temperature and boiler pressure. Thanks for pointing that out. But the most inexpensive and quite easy way to gain control of your shot is to install a digital group thermometer. Then you pull when your green light goes off or after turning off the machine when the pressure relief valve stops hissing. That gives you consistent pressure/boiler temp for dialing in your shots with measured temperature on the outside of the group.