When does your pump activate?

Marc Young

For those of you who are running off the tank, does your pump activate each time you pull the lever down to make a drink? Or does the pump activate at different times, dependent on how much water is needed? For me, the pump will activate after a long flush, may activate after a short flush, and sometimes activates when I make a drink. Often times I make a drink without the pump turning on but the pump will later turn on when I perform a cleaning flush.

Frans Goddijn

The water level probe tells the controller when a certain amount of water has left the boiler. So a long flush will do that, and what you call a short flush may do that to depending on how short it is (a 15g flush can be enough to clean the shower screen and restart the TS after an extraction). Pulling an espresso can take 50-60g of water from the boiler and in most cases that will also trigger the pump to top up the boiler water level.

So what you describe sounds all very logical to me.

Marc Young

Thanks you Frans. I saw a couple videos in which the pump activated as soon as the lever was pulled when making a shot and it struck me that my machine doesn't usually do that. Two videos is a small sample but I figured I'd ask just to be safe.

Matthew Hoffman

My experience is the same as yours.

Marc Young

I appreciate it Matt, thanks for sharing.

Ben B

My experience is the same as the OP. However this might be the case if you have an accumulator tank that is passively pushing water to the machine (versus the pump cycling). If you don't have an accumulator/tank then the pump is more likely to run with/during each shot, since there is no passive pressurized reservoir.

I recently tested this by turning shutting off the reservoir and pulling a couple of shots, and a few cleaning/flushing quick pulls, the pump cycled each time water was extracted from the machine, as expected.