About a year ago I bought a quickmill carola https://www.quickmill.it/en/products/lever-group/carola-mod-0960/.
In general it’s not a bad machine; I like the E61 system, I’m happy with the PID and it’s compact and looks ok. I absolutely hate the vibration pump, though. It takes 10-15 seconds from activating the pump to get to max pressure which is a significant of my shot time. I havn’t found a great way to deal with it and I’m close to get a different machine just because of the pump.
Does anyone have a vibration pump and is happy with it? Is there some technique you’re using with the E61 to get around it maybe?
A slow pressure ramp-up is probably good for your coffee (especially if it’s a lighter roast) because it’s effectively giving you pre-infusion.
Does it take that long with the backflush disc installed or just with coffee?
Maybe the pressure gauge is a little slow or laggy?
Could be, I’m using the built in one. However when I stop pumping and just hold the pressure, the gauge doesn’t move up anymore but almost immediatly a little down.
With coffe it took 25s, with the backflush disk it’s quicker but still takes a significant amount of time (11s). Sometimes its more, sometimes less, but always around that.
Ive had a few vibe pump machines in my time, and none of them have taken anywhere close to 10 seconds to reach pressure. Usually takes between 5 and 7.
Could be that you have a faulty pump. Was it always this slow?
I just tried again and it took 25 seconds (with coffee) to reach 9 bar. With the backflush disk it took 11s. It was always kinda slow but it might have gotten worse recently
I believe the BBE is a vibration pump, and it takes 2-4 seconds to reach pressure. The Mr. Coffee machine I had took a little bit longer, maybe 5ish seconds to reach pressure (though it didn’t have a pressure gauge, so I’m assuming pressure based on crema). You may want to contact their support and see if there’s anything they can do to help.
Edit: correct autocorrect
