ECM Espresso Machine

A few months ago I wrote a post about our Breville Espresso machine breaking down after purchasing it less than 2 years prior (16 months to be exact). To put things into perspective, a family member of ours has had their Espresso machine for 12 years now and it's still going strong, so a machine dying in 2 years is absolutely ridiculous and was very frustrating for us to say the least. Our experience left a sour taste in my mouth towards the Breville brand and ultimately, I would never purchase another machine by them or recommend Breville to anyone else. My wife read reviews online about Breville machines and found that many other owners had the same issue that we had; their machine started leaking after a short period of time in the same place as ours. The issue appeared to be pretty common it seemed.

Our bad luck with Breville didn't stop us from wanting another espresso machine though. Once you go down the path of owning an espresso machine its hard to go back to regular drip coffee. We started saving to buy a new one right away and recently we took the plunge and made a purchase.

I originally had my eyes on a lelit Bianaca after watching some videos online and there were a few of them in the store we went to. The store owner said that they have become quite popular lately and a lot of people have been buying them. Then he told us that they were owned by Breville and we immediately soured on the idea. My wife looked up reviews online for the Lelit model and found that people started complaining about Lelit machines leaking starting in 2020, the year that Breville bought the company! After asking more questions the store owner eventually informed us that the Lelit machines have a lot of complicated parts inside which, based on what I saw in our Breville when I opened it up, means that they are made with more cheap plastic tubing and fittings and have many many more failure points.

My guess is that Breville did the typical corporate thing. They bought a competitors brand that was a good product then gutted the internal workings and replaced them with cheaper materials to bring costs down and make the machine more profitable. In my mind, buying a Lelit was essentially buying a Breville in disguise 🥸

So we pivoted from Lelit and narrowed our choice down to two other machines with dual broilers, Profitec vs ECM. The two brands are actually owned by the same German company and essentially have all of the same interal parts. Our online research found some very minor differences between the two models that we were looking at, but the shop owner said that it really just comes down to the look of the machine and its usabilty. "Do you want joysticks or turning knobs for your controls?" Even the prices were almost the exact same and both models were on sale at the time. Luckily for us.

For us the ECM Synchronika won out in the end by a small margin. I can't even remember what cinched the deal for us.

Unboxing this bad boy. Oooo so shiny!

The one challenge to this machine is that it doesn't have a programmable automatic start timer. Actually, none of the models that we were interested in had this feature, which was somewhat of a surprise for us.

The difficulty of not having an automatic start is that these machines take a very long time to heat up before they can be used, approximately 15 minutes or more. That's a very long time to wait in the morning on a work day. I don't particularly want to stand around for 15 minutes waiting for a machine to heat up when I'm already rushed to get ready and out the door in the morning.

My wife figured out a pretty genius work around though. A smart plug to the rescue! We plugged the machine into the smart plug and then programmed the smart plug to turn on 20 minutes before we wake up in the morning and shut off about 5-10 minutes after we are done our morning coffee routine. The process has worked out great so far.

We still have our Breville grinder from before and that is working fine for now. I actually have no complaints about it.

For extras, we purchased a new sliding drawer style knock box for the used Espresso pucks.

We also bought a new rubber tamper pad for the counter.

Previously we were using a makeshift cork trivet which wasn't the right size for the portafilter which caused its own set of challenges.

The ECM machine came with a new tamper as well, which is a much better quality than the one that the Breville machine came with.

Its solid stainless steel other than the handle and easily triple the weight compared to the flimsy plastic and aluminum Breville model. Even the top little magnetic piece fell off the Breville tamper and got stuck in the machine housing slot 🙄. I don't mean to keep ranting about Breville but you can understand the frustration about spend a lot of money on something only for it to give you problems after 6 months and then completely die on you after a year and a half. Regardless, you can see the difference in quality between the two tampers in the photo.

One thing that slightly annoys me about this new machine is that the portafilter doesn't line up straight, though it's supposed to. Online it says that this can be common among new machines and will go away in time, essentially after the machine expands and contracts a little when heated and cooled. It could also be that the gasket in the grouphead is slightly too big or the basket in the Portafilter is sitting too high. Overall I think that it's a minor issue that I'm hoping will resolve itself overtime, or I figure it out myself.

For my inaugural coffee I made an Americano and it was really delicious. Since then I've had several of the same as well as a few Cappuccinos. The espresso shots that the machine are producing are top notch in my opinion.

I haven't figured out how to do latte art yet but my wife is getting better and better at it and almost made a heart yesterday. Or maybe its a tulip? Regardless, its the best that either of us have come up with yet 😆

We are still getting used to the new home set up, but so far we are quite pleased by the ECM Espresso Machine. I would say that its still too early for me to recommend it to others to purchase but I will say that its been simple to use and that the coffee it has been making has been excellent so far. We are very happy with the purchase.