The S1 Cafe - Helping Your Espresso Dreams Become Reality

Hi, I've finally been able to plumb in and switch on the ten year old Vivaldi ii I bought 2nd hand in May. First thing is it's so dirty I just ran a lot of water through it and cleaned the screens though this didn't make much difference to the dirty brown water that was coming out of it. I decided to try making a coffee but this went very badly indeed; nasty looking, brackish tasting coffee as expected but then machine started to make strange noises as of pressure building up to dangerous levels. Just as I thought it was going to explode there was a huge noisy burst of steam and everything calmed down again. Very alarmed I switched it off . The same thing happened the next time I switched it on and I haven't used it since. I'm completely new to this and was pretty daunted by the complexity of the machine but now I'm scared to switch it on. I thought I'd start by descaling it and found the very useful post from JohnB from July 08 but the pictures aren't available.
Please can anyone shed any light on what might be happening and/ or are there any pictures of how to dismantle it for descaling. Many thanks.

First things first. Assuming that you plan to descale both boilers, be sure to buy and have on hand new lid gaskets for each before you start. Also, get some food grade citric acid powder. The cheapest option for the latter maybe your local beer store or an internet beer store. You can probably get a pound for a couple of bucks.

It sounds like the over pressure valve on top of the steam boiler is popping off. While you probably need to descale it get rid of the muck and bad flavor, you'll need a new temperature sensor in order to keep in order to prevent the overpressure situation. Optionally, the triac on the boiler power board could be shorted on.

At least I am assuming the blow out was from the steam boiler and not the coffee boiler. Let me know if I am wrong.

Er what's a lid gasket? (One day I won't sound quite so stupid about this)

s1v2/V2%20Manuals/RICAMBI%20S1%20NEW.pdf

Part numbers 7418 and 899.

http://www.chriscoffee.com/searchresult ... earch=7418
http://www.chriscoffee.com/searchresults.asp?Search=899

Thank you!