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Reviews (1)
Sep 14, 2021
Recommended for consistent espresso quality, but temperature tweaking still useful
3 of 3 found this helpful The bottom line first:
I would buy this kit again for another Silvia and thus recommend it for coffee-lovers who care much about a consistent shot quality.
However, the PID-Kit makes coffee-making not as convenient as I expected it to be, but once you get the trick, the Silvia makes certainly better coffee than without the kit.
In detail my personal observations:
Advantages:
- Espresso machine is always ready for a shot when "on" and after the initial pre-heating. No need for "temperature surfing" anymore.
- Taste/quality of coffee is consistent.
- Recovery after a shot gets back to the precise shot temperature
- Fine-tuning of boiler temperature (during the shot and during stand-by) becomes realistically possible.
- Real-time monitoring of the boiler temperature during shot and during stand-by.
- Kit is complete and the fitting process is well explained. Took me about 2 hours, doing at for the first time.
Disadvantages:
- Heat-up time gets longer, as the heating is done with less power. This prevents initial overheating (aka "over-shoot"). The Kit-manufacturer recommends an initial stand-by time before preparing coffee of 45 minutes (plus the time to heat up the boiler, wo almost an hour all together). Who has that much time before leaving for work in the morning?
- Recovery time after a shot is longer
- The heating during the shot in order to maintain a stable water temperature can be less effective imo, because heater does not heat to its full potential even during the shot.
Measurements:
This is an update: I got myself a K-type-sesor temperature measurement tool. Here are my findings with the PID-temperature set to 108° C, brewing espresso with the 2-portion-portafilter:
Second PID-Temperature Brewwater temperature Comment
display measurement
0 108 84 Before hot brewater reaches the grind
5 102 93 Initial temperature
10 101 92
15 100 90
20 100 91
25 99 92
30 98 93
35 97 94
Final comment: Not surprisingly, the brew-water-temperature has a U-shape. The gap between the actual brew-water-temperature and the measurements at of the PID-sensor gets smaller over time. Anyway, even with the PID, the temperature goes down 3° C. However, I can't compare to how it was before installing the PID.
Tweaks: Steam-Temperature-Knob
These disadvantages can partially be worked around by tweaking the heating behavior using the steam-heating-knob on the Silvia. This is true for this particular kit that does not control steam temperature. However, if using the steam-heating-knob, the process of coffee-making and controlling the temperature is not anymore "set it and forget it", but gets to be another kind of "temperature-surfing" routine, which is however more precise than without the PID-Kit, which is obviously important for a consistent espresso quality. If I find the time to measure using the steam-know-tweaking, I'll post an update.
Note: I use the kit on a Silvia V3, that is an older variant of the machine. In the manufacturer description a read, that the heating time can be slower on older machines. So it may well be that the above described disadvantages are less notable on newer models. Anyway, the tradeoff between heating speed and temperature accuracy remains. Installing the kit means, deciding for clearly more accuracy and potentially less speed.