A couple of steamy videos The first one is with the stock one hole tip. Steam pressure drops quickly to .85 bar, heater kicks in and it will stay there forever. Doesn't take too long to recover back to 1.3 bar when shut off. The one hole tip is OK for a small cap but lacks steam power. The second video is with the 2 hole tip I mentioned in some earlier posts. Steam power starts off good put quickly loses ground. The heater can't keep up with the tip. Again recovery is pretty quick. As Jim and Dan had mentioned, maybe there is a middle ground on tips here that might prove a better solution.

Cheers

Ian

I see the problem. The holes on the three hole tips on home lever machines (and the Semi) are small enough to maintain adequate steaming pressure at around 0.75 bar, which is where a 1.5L to 2L boiler with 700 to 900 watts heat will drop. The holes on the tips you are using are too large and they die. Chris or Jim would have sourced such a tip for a machine like this; but WLL isn't that into it.

I'm sure Ascaso or someone would be happy to do an order of 100. There's a Brewtus user's group that may be interested.

Ian,

What size holes are in the tips you are using?

On my B1, the single hole is around 1.4 mm (1.54 MM^2).

I also have a gold pro tip that comes with two 1.0 mm holes (1.57 mm^2).
I drilled an additional 1.0 mm between them for a total area of 2.36 mm^2.

With a 975 watt heater element, my B1 will maintain around 1.15 bar with the single tip.

Using the three hole tip drops pressure to around 0.9 to 0.7 bar by around 30 seconds and continues to hover around 0.7 bar till the auto fill kicks in around 50 seconds and knocks the pressure further down to 0.55 bar.

Terry, hard for me to tell without a micrometer but they look well over 1mm probably close to the 1.4 you have on your single hole tip. I think a good compromise as Jim suggested would be the gold pro tip. If I can get one in before I finish I'll give it a try.

Cheers

Ian

FWIW, on my Vibiemme Double Domo, I changed the 2 holes from 1.4 to 1mm and I can steam @ ~1bar continuously. It takes over 2 minutes of steaming into open air for the boiler to drop to 0.7bar. The DB has a 1.4L boiler and 1kw heater.

Sorry for the long delay... The Buyer's Guide to the Expobar Brewtus III is finally online. Comments, corrections and follow-up questions to the article are all welcome in Article Feedback.