The S1 Cafe - Helping Your Espresso Dreams Become Reality

Hi

I purchased a Dream from CCS a few weeks ago and am pretty happy so far. Even though it seemed to have some growing pains over the past couple of years, I just couldn't pass on all the features it offered at the price point... So I hope that's all behind LaSpaz

The one thing however that seemed off was the temperature in the cup. I had a Quickmill Andreja for several years before the Dream, and in contrast the shots from the Dream with offset set to zero were quite a bit cooler and for that matter were sour. I started running a couple of warming flushes before pulling a shot which helped a little.

So I contacted CCS about it, and they indicated the machine had not been calibrated with a scace. Based on that I decided to increase the offset. At about +5F it seems better to me, but I'm a bit concerned as all the threads I've read on S1cafe seem to indicate that folks are using zero or +1F.

Am I alone with a setting this high, or are other Dream users needing to raise the offset this high.

BTW, I have the "rental" scace being delivered sometime this week (thanks Gregor), so I'll know for sure soon. But was just wondering.

Note I am using the 1.19 firmware

My offset is 0 with 1.19. It was +8 before that version. Perhaps you might try to reinstall 1.19 while waiting for the scace.

What actual temperature are you setting the machine at? It will be easier to give advice (if any is still needed) once we hear what the Scace says. Using 1.19 firmware, my offset is, +1C. Have you confirmed that you have the default PID settings and that they didn't somehow get set wrong?

Chas, PID settings are default. Though I planned to change them to what you reccomended in another thread after I get the offset calibrated to see how that works.

The temp is set to 200F. Maybe it's me and I'm used to a slightly hotter shot from the E61 group, but the shots seemed a bit sour at the zero offset. Will see in a few days how calibrated my tastebuds are

Well it seems I wasn't far off. Using the scace it looks like my machine requires a +4F offset.

One thing that is interesting is that I tried the PID settings that Chas recommended in a post a while back. When I used these settings I needed to drop the offset to +1F. So I put the PID back to factory settings thinking maybe it was related to how long the machine was on. But when I ran the test again, the temp was low and needed to up the offset again to +4F. Any thoughts on this?

BTW, I did note that I needed to pull a couple of warming shots to get a stable temp. Even after the machine had been on for an hour, the first pull was always a degree or two low. By the third or fourth it had stabilized and was pretty consistent there after. I think that's normal...