The S1 Cafe - Helping Your Espresso Dreams Become Reality

I am not sure this is exactly a failure, but I am wondering what other folks might think. Basically after about 3 months I had a few incidents where on starting the Dream the steam pump started running and would not stop, overflowing water all over the place. After a few emails and calls with Chris Coffee and subsequently taking the machine apart and removing the fill probe, basically the fill probe has scale on it and needs to be cleaned. I used some fine sandpaper and it worked perfectly after that. My concern is mainly - is this really something I should have to do every 3 months? We've had other espresso machines for years and never had a similar issue of any sort.

One more thing - here is a pic of my water hardness test. We do not have a softener, just the filter from CC installed. Would it be recommended to add a water softener or anything else to be done to prevent this from ever happening again?
Thanks,

Based on the test strips you're hardness looks fine. HOWEVER, using those same strips my hardness also looks fine. Still I wasn't sure I trusted the strips so I recently bought a liquid based tester like those used for aquariums or pools. Using that liquid tester, instead of 3 grains like I thought I had using the test strips, I am seeing 7 grains AFTER softening through a new cartridge and more like 14 grains on the input side of the cartridge.

Interesting - I'll have to check that out. We are on well water so it doesn't have chlorine either - not sure what that means - except wondering if we have the same or different filtering requirements. Is the test you are checking for specifically water hardness or some other minerals or something in the water?

Thanks,

My experience is the same as Chas. My strips looked like yours, but when I used the liquid aquarium test kit I had 17 grains input instead. I added a bestmax combo filter/ix unit and that brought it down to 3 grains on bypass 1 on the filter.