homeburrero wrote:That's how it's supposed to work. These valves not only prevent a vacuum when the boiler cools, they also are designed to vent off air from inside the boiler when the machine first heats up.

BTW it's the pressure safety valve that opens in this case. (The vacuum breaker opens at low pressure and the safety valve opens at high pressure.)

Got it!

Normally how long should the pressure remain stable once it reaches the desired point (1.2 in my case)? With this machine it takes about 30-40 seconds until the heating element has to engage again to bring the pressure back up.

One more thing: someone said in the thread I linked to in my first post that you should reset the safety thermostats by pressing the small button in the middle. Should I expect to hear a click or anything when I do so?

musica wrote:Normally how long should the pressure remain stable once it reaches the desired point (1.2 in my case)? With this machine it takes about 30-40 seconds until the heating element has to engage again to bring the pressure back up.

My Rocket Evo takes over 90 seconds to drop from 1.1 bar to 0.9 bar, but unlike your Appartamento mine has an insulated boiler, which gives me a longer cycle time.

Here's a graph of a typical p-stat controlled boiler pressure cycle from Eric Svendson:


30-40 seconds does seem a bit short, although I once had an ECM Giotto with an un-insulated boiler and a pressurestat with an unusually tight deadband (turned on at a little over 0.9 bar and off at about 1.0 bar) that would cycle on-off every 30-40 seconds.

According to Eric's graph, it takes about 20 seconds to go down .1 bar. I think that's pretty consistent with the way my machine behaves.

I just pulled a few shots and had to turn it off and back on a few times to reach 1.2 bar. What I noticed though was that as the pressure was going back down, I heard the pStat click at around 1 bar, but the heating element failed to kick in. That does look like a bad relay, doesn't it? Or could this all be due to a faulty heating element?

musica wrote:. What I noticed though was that as the pressure was going back down, I heard the pStat click at around 1 bar, but the heating element failed to kick in. That does look like a bad relay, doesn't it? Or could this all be due to a faulty heating element?

That does point to a controller relay rather than a pressurestat problem. Probably not a faulty element in this case. A failure to heat when the pressurestat clicks on could be a controller problem or sometimes can be a bad connection in the element circuit, or a flaky protective thermoswitch (aka hi-limit). But a flaky connection or thermoswitch would not cause that other symptom you observed, where your heater sometimes fails to turn off when it's supposed to. So I think you most likely have a bad controller.

Fortunately that Rocket/ProElInd controller is not as expensive as some. Still worthwhile I think to see if the dealer that sold you the machine will cut you a special deal. If not then you may want to contact jpboyt (https://boytenterprises.com/) to see if he can handle repairs for European customers.

musica wrote:According to Eric's graph, it takes about 20 seconds to go down .1 bar. I think that's pretty consistent with the way my machine behaves.

I just pulled a few shots and had to turn it off and back on a few times to reach 1.2 bar. What I noticed though was that as the pressure was going back down, I heard the pStat click at around 1 bar, but the heating element failed to kick in. That does look like a bad relay, doesn't it? Or could this all be due to a faulty heating element?

When a heating element goes it's typically not an intermittent failure. It seems like your element is OK, but your control board is malfunctioning.

Nick

I contacted the shop I bought the machine from and they agreed to send me a replacement for the control box. I'll post an update when I get it. Thanks for the great help so far!

Quick tip, before you remove and replace the controller, snap a picture that clearly shows wire color to pin number. It'll save you a ton of time down the road.

Hope you receive it soon and you're back up and running quickly.

Nick

Luckily, Appartamentos have multi-wire connectors that only fit their correct locations on the Gicar box, except for the P-Stat connection which could go on the LED connection or the P-Stat connection... Closest to edge of box is P-Stat.

Hi guys, a little update: so I replaced the box and now the pStat seems to be working fine (albeit with a very narrow bandwidth that forces the machine to reheat every 20 seconds or so -- is that liable to cause problems down the line?). However a new problem came up: after heating fine for some time, the machine starts blinking and stops heating (water tank is full, and if I'm not mistaken, it seems to blink at a lower rate than when the tank is empty)...

Here's a video: <missing video>

OOoh. That's weird. That's not "Out of water" blink, you're correct.
That looks to me like the box is powering up, light switches on, split second pause while it does the water checks, then it is trying to turn on a component, either element or Pump + Fill-Solenoid, short circuit drops available voltage to the point where the controller has to shut down, light goes off, it restarts, light comes back on, water level check for a split second, powers up the component again and repeats.

Step 1 would be to unplug the machine, take the top, splash shield and three-side body panel off. Then, disconnect both element leads, put electrical tape over the contacts if the insulators are cracked and/or there's any chance they could touch anything, plug the machine in and turn it on again. If it still shorts out with the element out of the circuit, the element isn't the short-circuiting component. Unplug machine. Reconnect the element and repeat the proceedure with the pump connections disconnected, then with the boiler fill solenoid connections disconnected...
If none of these components turn out to be the cause of the repeating reset, the problem could be in the control box itself. Sorry.