Been a busy couple of days chez UNM. Due to signs of long term weeping around the HX top connection, I took the plunge and disconnected one of the brass fittings (standard screw connection). Wrapped thread seal PTFE tape on the fitting and reassembled in the hope this will fix the leak. If good, I will do the other one later. If I made it worse, I have only buggered up one side. This morning I staggered out to the driveway and dumped the azky on its back, then propped up to get reasonable drainage from the boiler and gave the inside a good old rinse out with a hose and fine needle jet nozzle. Be careful if doing this sort of thing - it may be a compact, but still weighs around 50kg. There was no noticeable hard scale (good old melbourne water and it also presumably ran on a filter). Quite a bit of grey sludge in the bottom of the boiler though - could be related to the blown and corroded element Fitted the new element, tightened everything up, checked out all functions except the heating. All good, autofill working fine, volumetric buttons working. One thing though - when I powered up, the pump ran for approx 20 seconds, then the LED on the front panel (next to power switch) started flashing. Fault code perhaps? It did this several times, until the tank was filled and since then has been fine. I assume that it expects a maximum run time for the pump and triggers a fault if pump runs too long. The LED on the Gicar controller always flashes, so I assume that is normal. Hooked up the element this afternoon in between jobs - machine now runs at choice of 1200W or 2400W (one leg of element unused). Pstat is set to cut power at 1.2bar and comes back on at 0.97. Duty cycle was 35 secs on, 2 mins off. Slight weeping from the HX connection I worked on 🙁, but it seems to have stopped after the machine fully up to temp. Time will tell. Pulled a few shots with some stale grounds I keep lying around for seasoning shots. Definitely needs different dosing to my little gaggia classic, so that will affect grind setting, shouldn't take too long to dial it in though. Backflushed both groups (4 times) to get rid of the old crud. Definitely runs hot and needs a cooling flush, will need to learn how long is required. Managed to get the shower screen out of one group when it was hot - just gently levered it and the screen came out along with the group seal (which is in pretty fair condition). I may pull a drinkable shot tomorrow if the planets align for me.
