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?
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.