edwa wrote:Nope, the portafilter gasket, screen and dispersion screen were all JUST replaced. Regardless of those the long idle temp of the e61 should be up around 205 f on my thermometer. not down at 172.

In my case, the mixing chamber, brewing pathways, and exhaust were gunked up as well. I completely disassembled the group to clean everything i could get at and it now works well, but at this stage haven't installed Eric's thermometer yet. Water is steaming a bit coming out of the group with the boiler gauge showing 1 bar. No parts were replaced.

erics wrote:Watch the boiler pressure gage and you will see it slowly fall to around 0.75 bar. At that point you should hear a click (the mechanical relay) and the boiler pressure will rise to around 0.95 bar in about 5-6 seconds. It should take about 90 seconds for it to fall to 0.75 bar and the cycle begins

Eric, the gauge rises to 1.3 and falls to 1.0 and then relay clicks around 55-65 seconds. I took the cover off removed the PF and 28 minutes from start it's warmed up to 200f, a first since I brought it home. 204 at 34 minutes. 205 at 38 1/2 minutes. That's back at normal and all I've done is removed the cover and put the newer thermometer back in. At 45 minutes I'll do the 1-2 second group flush and walk away for 15-20 minutes. 205.5 at 45 minutes. Flush for 1 sec or so. At 17 minutes the temp reading is 204 and at 20 minutes 204.5

Hmmm, I just did 2 back to back shots and rebound was good. 1st shot at 201.5 ish and second was a touch hotter because I flushed a little short in anticipation of a poor rebound. I'll see what happens in the morning maybe it needs a longer period "on" for the leak to cause problems . Could it have been trapped air from the service that caused a thermosyphon stall and the purging I did last night to make sure the boiler refilled fixed it?


I'll post tomorrow morning. Thanks again.

First 2 back to back shots of the morning were in the normal range. Happy wife, happy life, eh?

I'm not certain what changed, but I'll put the outer shell back on and continue on. This mornings idle temp was 204 but the ambient air is cooler than last night so I expect that would account for the 1.5 difference. Hopefully it was nothing more than trapped air but I'm still not convinced the pump sounds the same. It's also much quieter without the outer shell attached. I also changed the timer so that the machine had a 1 hour warm versus 2 hours.

Thank you all.

I wanted to add a postscript to this thread. 3 months almost to the day that I posted the initial problem, the heating element died, more specifically it had a short in it and every time that the machine heated up for about 8 minutes the GFI circuit would trip. Interestingly, the steam pressure gauge that had just been replaced died also. I now suspect that the erratic temperature rebounds were the first signs of my element troubles.