Thanks. With respect to the group head (stainless steel and flat heater), at some point the 1.44 can be fully upgraded to the 1.46? How about when the reservoir and drip tray are upgraded? The new pump you mentioned? Being a pc build type of person, knowing almost everything inside can be upgraded when available or needed is great.

Also, is the version shipped the the US, the CE certified version (in addition to UL listed) - you mentioned the EU is stricter about lead and other things.

When you think of the traditional machine makers, how's does the the current 1.44 decent compare in terms of materials selection? Plastics, silicone, SS, brass, etc. I am concerned about two things: Health and Safety, and Reliability (and no leaks).

I couldn't find any info on portafilter compatibility. Is is custom or e61-compatible for example?

QQ: I hear lots about great accessories designed by the community. Where do I go to find these?

One more question: what is the privacy policy with respect my use of the decent? I don't mean pointing me to a legal "privacy" policy, but in layman's terms, what info does Decent collect, use or share? There is a difference between aggregated data about the shots themselves vs. knowing/tracking the coffee habits of an individual. Thanks in advance.

I'm cross-shopping the Decent with the Micra, Londinium, and potentially the ES-1. I've heard that the decent can't match the Londinium for flow rate to the grouphead during pre infusion. Will the new water distribution parts in the grouphead improve this?

Guest blog from the Head Beancounter

Bugs Harpley (CEO, cofounder, and head beancounter), me and most of the HK staff, have spent the past few weeks tracking down every "thingy and whats-it" that we sell, or use to put build our espresso machines.

We've built a system that takes Bugs' "bill of materials" and deducts (in real time) every time we build a machine. For every machine we build https://decentespresso.com/batches we know what part we used and what it cost. Every model, every revision, gets a slightly different BOM. At the end of our year (April 1) we have to figure out why some part is "+300 overstock" or some other is "-1000 over-taken". After the annual Audit, we're not allowed to adjust anything, so this is our chance to figure things out, before it's too late.

Bugs is quite proud of her system, and wanted to share what it takes to run a "tight ship" of a manufacturing company.

This is her "guest blog" :


--

Countdown

31st March is stock take day for Decent. Once a year a Hong Kong auditor arrives "armed" with a clipboard early in the morning and picks random SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit) from our shelves and has us count them in front of them. The quantity has to match the quantity that we claim to have on the books in the accounting system.

For a manufacturing company there are normally a lot of different SKUs to keep track of, for us it's actually pretty modest at 378, but that's because screws, clips, o-rings and small cables are classified as non-inventory and don't need to be counted in an accounting system. We have 465 different types of those little tiny things.

Maintaining all previous versions of machines means we can't write off any old stock either, we have to store it and track it and most importantly know where to find it when a V1.0 machine comes back in the shop for repair so a lot of factory space is dedicated to keeping parts so that previous machines can be kept up and running as well.

We started off really badly at keeping track of things, our first year we failed the stock take, no one really knew where all the boxes were, nothing was labelled correctly with a SKU, and we didn't have a good way of getting the right inventory into the accounting system (the BOM). Year by year we slowly got better, boxes were labelled and organised, floor maps created to show locations, the BOM was built and we corrected and corrected it and little by little we started getting better at working out how many things and which things it takes to build the 73 different versions past and present of Decent Espresso machines.

This year everyone worked so hard to prepare for the stock take, rummaging under desks, labelling everything with the correct SKU, writing off the bad defective stock and yes again making small corrections to the BOM. The auditor arrived and randomly picked 81 different SKUs from the shelves a total of 83,030 individual pieces had to be counted. And we were out by........1 piece.

This week the staff will get some time off and eat a lot of cake as thanks for their efforts but after that it's time to work out just how we can make it even easier and more accurate to get the numbers right and maybe next year we might get to that elusive 0.

- Bugs Harpley, CEO Decent Espresso

NetLawMan wrote:QQ: I hear lots about great accessories designed by the community. Where do I go to find these?

check out
https://decentespresso.com/manual

There's a lot there...

NetLawMan wrote:One more question: what is the privacy policy with respect my use of the decent? I don't mean pointing me to a legal "privacy" policy, but in layman's terms, what info does Decent collect, use or share? There is a difference between aggregated data about the shots themselves vs. knowing/tracking the coffee habits of an individual. Thanks in advance.

On your DE1, we collect nothing that is shared. All remains on your own tablet.

There is no need to use wifi, except to get de1app updates.

If you get a https://visualizer.coffee/ account, then your shots are uploaded there automatically, but by default, they're not shared with anyone (you have to enable that). Many people choose to share their shot history, but that's up to you.

-john

flyingtoaster wrote:I'm cross-shopping the Decent with the Micra, Londinium, and potentially the ES-1. I've heard that the decent can't match the Londinium for flow rate to the grouphead during pre infusion. Will the new water distribution parts in the grouphead improve this?

As far as I know, all lever machines drop all their water, immediately at the start of the shot. Their flow rates are practically "infinity". There might be exceptions, so please, HBers, correct me.

The DE1 tops out around 8ml/s flow rate, where as rotary pump machines typically are around 8ml/s to 13ml/s.

Note that an espresso is typically something around 30g to 40g of water, so these flow rates are only useful during the first few seconds of the shot, thereafter all espresso machines slow down to 1 ml/s to 4ml/s.

-john

Thank you kindly for your responses.

NetLawMan wrote:Thanks. With respect to the group head (stainless steel and flat heater), at some point the 1.44 can be fully upgraded to the 1.46?

It can be, but I'd ask "why do you want to?" We're switching to SS for cost savings (we can cast the stainless) but the performance will be identical to brass, after we reduce mass, so I don't see why you'd want to spend money swapping out a perfectly good part.

NetLawMan wrote: How about when the reservoir and drip tray are upgraded?

Not sure what improvements you're referring to, as I can't think of anything exciting that we're doing there. Well, we're working on moving to ceramic-coated aluminum, which will reduce the weight and breakability.

But yeah, swapping out the water tank and drip tray is trivially easy, you just buy it from our webstore.

NetLawMan wrote:The new pump you mentioned? Being a pc build type of person, knowing almost everything inside can be upgraded when available or needed is great.

Don't know yet. It depends on size and controllers needed. The new pump is DC driven, whereas the current pumps are AC driven, so it's not a 1:1 swap.

NetLawMan wrote:Also, is the version shipped the the US, the CE certified version (in addition to UL listed) - you mentioned the EU is stricter about lead and other things.

We "sum up" the compliance requirements, so that we can make the same machine for everyone. For the 3 heaters, for instance, we have 3 safeties, so that we comply with the USA (thermostat) and EU (two thermal fuses) regulations.

NetLawMan wrote:When you think of the traditional machine makers, how's does the the current 1.44 decent compare in terms of materials selection? Plastics, silicone, SS, brass, etc. I am concerned about two things: Health and Safety, and Reliability (and no leaks).

Anything made in the EU *today* is in compliance with current lead standards.

However, lead standards were (I think) insanely loose decades ago, and I wouldn't recommend vintage machines if you're worried about lead.

And we have to comply as well, with Germany and Japan being the most stringent. I've shared PDFs of our independent testing reports, here on HB, and I can send them to you if you can't find them in the archives of this thread.

In terms of leaks, we've gone with the Nespresso connector standard, because it can move when there's no pressure, and thus doesn't have the thermal-cycling leaking problem that traditional machines that use welds or threaded connectors have.

NetLawMan wrote:I couldn't find any info on portafilter compatibility. Is is custom or e61-compatible for example?

We're E61/LM compatible.

-john