Hello,

I have it for almost a month. I would like some advise and to clear some things from people that have it and in general have more experience than me.

I am aware that due to E61 the warm up time is long, and I tend to start pulling my first shot after 30 minutes. Portafilter locked to the group while warm up.
Before the first shot I do flush some water for 1-2 seconds and I see the PID temperature to immediately lose 1c. I am thinking that's normal as once you open the brew lever pumps starts to push water and taking fresh water from the tank at the same time. Or because I am not that patient with it and I should wait longer to warm up. To be honest I see the temp going 1c down and then seconds later back to the temp I have set it. Is this an indication that the grouphead is not to its optimal temp and I need to increase my warm up wait time ?

After each shot, I do flush some water to get rid of any coffee residue that's left in the shower screen and at the end of the day I do a 10 seconds backflush with just water . My question is , is the pump gets stressed while backflushing and I should avoid it once a day and decrease it to once a week?

It's a bit puzzling to me as I am trying to understand how it works . I didn't realize why people all around the web were talking for long warm up times until I saw how massive the grouphead is . Acts like a giant heatsink.

To give more details on my thinking;
The boiler itself heats up to temp in 10ish minutes. I have set it to 89c. After that is the play I mention, to 1c down and back to the temp I set it every 1 minute or so. So I am thinking it's the warm up of the group, as it pulls heat from the boiler. But at some point that play of the temp shouldn't stop or at least be less frequent?. So to have an indication if the group is properly heated up or not.

For now my indication is the portafilter actually, if I happen to leave it warm up more than 30 minutes the portafilter is warm up to its handle, the portafilter "head" is very warm and you can barely touch it. In the 30 minute mark the head is warm , but not as warm as the group and the handle just starts to warm up. It's where I am wondering that 30 minutes maybe is not enough.

Remember, the PID controls the temperature of the brew boiler, so you should always see a slight drop in temp after pulling a shot. I see about up to 3 degree Fahrenheit drop between pulls.

As far as warm up times for the group, 30 to 45 minutes is about right. I use a Wemo to auto start it about 30 minutes before my morning alarm and by the time I make it down, the portafilter handle is fairly toasty. This just helps with maintaining temperature for the water path when the water is sent from the brew boiler to the portafilter.

I would say 30 to 45 min is not too uncommon - my other machine - LS Mini Vivaldi took about 30 minutes or so to get it properly to temp. And this is a newer design with the Brew boiler and the grouphead being much closer.

There was another thread that talked about the warm up times. The Lelit seem to be around 20 minutes or so and the Decent a bit less then that. But i would say for the majority of us, having the unit warm up is not a major issue.

CamBam_HB wrote:Remember, the PID controls the temperature of the brew boiler, so you should always see a slight drop in temp after pulling a shot. I see about up to 3 degree Fahrenheit drop between pulls.

Up to 3F?! Was not expecting that can drop that much. I can relax now


Any comments about backflushing daily at the end of the day? Does it damage the pump long term? Or any harm in general?

Yea, I see up to 3F drop but it usually recovers within 90 seconds or so, enough for me to prep my next drink. I usually pull 3 shots over the course of 10 minutes.

Your backflush routine is fine and don't worry about damaging the pump. Again, using my LS Mini Vivaldi II, I was the 3rd owner and had pulled well over 5k shots before I had to replace my pump. It took about 20 minutes and the part was less than $50 US dollars to replace it.

Thank you both of you

I have my Profitec 600 on for an hour before I use it. I use to just do 45 minutes but I've seen an improvement in the consistancy between the first and 4-5th shots with the longer warmup. I also run two 8-9 second backflushes with the blind filter before I pull any shots. This seems to remove any air that is trapped from the heat cool cycle and again improves the consistancy of my first shot. I also back flush twice at the end of each morning session before I turn it off. This keeps things nice and clean as I only do a detergent backflush about twice a year and when I do there isn't a huge backlog of brown water.

In other words, your machine seems normal and maybe try a longer heat up time.

Syllom wrote: Any comments about backflushing daily at the end of the day? Does it damage the pump long term? Or any harm in general?

So long as your pump sounds okay (Not stalling and going silent, or banging madly while trying to draw vacuum or anything) then the pump is moving water through. So long as there is flow, it is fine to run the pump against maximum back pressure (Probably about 10 bar) for 60 seconds so long as it gets an equal rest period afterward. Back flushing is very good for the valves in the grouphead and not noticeably detrimental to the pump or anything else.