Well, if you're a shop spending $1000/month on electricity and this cuts it to $500, you'd understand pretty fast. Or if you want to move into a new space and you can now get away with a smaller electrical feed you might also be quite happy. If you're a home user with a machine that's only on an hour a day, it barely matters. Also, if you want something besides a Decent that does proper temperature profiling, this might currently be the only answer for a shop.

I guess conceptually if you put a coiled heating element inside of a copper tube so the water ran over the coil and the coil had enough surface area to transfer all it's heat to the flowing water it might be as fast, but commonly you need to heat a chunk of metal with a long tube flowing through it and heat has to travel from element to metal to tube. With induction you just heat the tube and you can heat it both faster and hotter and because it should heat so fast, you don't have to leave it hot all the time.

ira wrote:I guess conceptually if you put a coiled heating element inside of a copper tube so the water ran over the coil and the coil had enough surface area to transfer all it's heat to the flowing water it might be as fast, but commonly you need to heat a chunk of metal with a long tube flowing through it and heat has to travel from element to metal to tube. With induction you just heat the tube and you can heat it both faster and hotter and because it should heat so fast, you don't have to leave it hot all the time.

Yeah that's more or less what the Breville does, from what I understand. I get that there's an advantage when you have a thermoblock, the speed of heating a large mass of metal would be faster with induction. It just wasn't clear to me that these new units have a block or if they're just heating the tube. Maybe they are somewhere in between.

Oh sorry, I just reread you said element *inside* the tube. Either way I'm just expressing the difference between designs with a big block of metal vs without. There are resistive heating examples of both.

gscace wrote:Embedded heaters with a control thermometer are not necessarily that fast. The heater transfers the heat through the element wall to the block (in the case of a thermoblock), and then through the thermoblock to the water. There is significant time lag in doing that and large temperature gradients between the heater and the water. Temperature sensed by the control thermometer is not necessarily the temperature at where the thermoblock and water meet, so there is a lot of art in thermoblock implementation and there are hard limits in speed due to the thermophysical properties of the materials used. Induction offers much higher speed and more precise injection of heat.

-Greg

Yes, thanks for the extra detail! I was aware that a large mass of metal would heat faster with induction (though the speed of resistive heating depends on the design, internal elements vs attached, thermal mass of block, etc). What I was uncertain of is whether this unit used a block or if it was similar to other proprietary PID controlled heating that doesn't rely on large thermal mass.

malling wrote:Yes its intriguing and a long wait none the less, but ain't the first out with quick heat up and low energy consumption there few machines beating them too it. There been some speculation on how Unica pro and Manument achieve it as it's incredibly fast heat up in the Unica Pro 1.5min and energy consumption mind blowing low.

But induction heating and no boiler is definitely the future we seen now quite the few implementation of such, this, Unica Pro, Manument Lever and Meticulous all are built around boilerless design and fast heat up and all with profiling capabilities but most are for the high market so far. Going to be intriguing the next few years see the technology drip down to lower level.

I have been watching the Unica Pro offering and what is a quite an unusual espresso machine as is the Heylo offering.
Both are expensive due to their unique technology. The Unica pro is $7300 and I has a similar size to the Linea Micra.
And both seem to be using a similar induction heating system that will produce instantaneous hot water upon demand.

To familiarize all what was gleaned quickly from a previous home Barista Forum posting about the Unica Pro.
To be clear, the information that we received from Unica is; no thermoblock heating is used.

The Unica Pro is a commercial espresso machine.
With our newly developed heating technology, we accurately heat the amount of water needed for your beverage.
As a result, the Unica pro consumes just 70 kWh/year in Eco mode. This is 22 times less than a comparable dual boiler system and four times less than a double thermoblock machine on the market to date.
A side effect of being that energy efficiency is the fast heating time. After turning the machine on,
the hot water is ready after 4s,
the brew group after the 90s,
and the steam boiler after the 120s.

Exact volumetric dosing
. Unica Pro produces precise & immediate/reproducible time and temperature control. That gives programed 'precise' water flow for coffee extraction and for steam production as well as water dispensing with no need for a scale or timer.
A reproducible and programmable coffee extraction and milk steaming every time.

The water heating, Unica pro is offering:
"It's heated on demand through six series-connected instantaneous water heaters with low thermal mass."
" .. it holds the temperature very precisely within +/-0.5 degree Celsius within the set target temperature. You will have no drop in temperature since we are heating on demand and have no boiler with hot water."

True however that should be possible to add via Firmware upgrade simply because of its quick change.