The S1 Cafe - Helping Your Espresso Dreams Become Reality

I developed a water leak at at my pressure relief valve on my La Spazale S1 Mini Vivaldi (valve sitting behind the water tank) , and decided to take it apart for cleaning/inspection. It was a little gunky inside, but mostly light surface brass discoloration. After cleaning it up, I flipped the round rubber seat back-to-front, thus giving the interface a new place to seat.

All is good so far, but then I realized that the tighter I reassembled the valve, the higher the pressure would be set to allow the valve to vent. The valve has a spring in it, which compresses a round rubber seat against one side of the fitting. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take any measurements prior to disassembling the valve. I realize that this is a safety measure.

I reinstalled the valve to see if would still leak, but all seems to be good. No drips at all.

Does anyone have any idea of how one would go about figuring out what the cracking pressure should be, or how many turns of the threads are needed to be within the "safe zone"? I realize that the latter wouldn't be optimal. I called Chris' Coffee, and the tech said that they just replace the valve (at a cost of $50+shipping). It seems absolutely silly to me to pay that much money to replace what is clearly a result of degradation of a seat that costs mere cents. It also seems like such a waste of resources.

Thanks a ton for your thoughts!

FWIW, I wrote to La Spazale asking about the pressure valve, and here is their response:

"The safety valve part no. 8582 must open at 1,5 bar.

The valve is presetted from the supplier, it is no possible to adjust the open pressure.

To check the open pressure of the safety valve, you can switch off the appliance, waiting until the machine is cold and then connect an air compressor to the steam wand of the machine in order to increase the boiler pressure and check the safety valve."

For giggles, I work at a scuba shop part-time as a service tech , and I think I can rig up something to deliver a metered 1.5 bar to the steam wand. We'll see how it goes.

I take it that I'm venturing into unknown territory here?