Decent's offering is good but vastly overcomplicated for the majority of people who don't want a tablet on their coffee machine in their kitchen. I much prefer the tactile experience of using a traditional espresso machine.
A fine, but expensive and mechanically complex solution. Dual boiler machines generally cost thousands even for small home machines. Commercial dual boiler machines will set you back at least $10-30k, easily.
Besides that, there's the warm up time. Often 30+ minutes on a commercial machine, then the electricity cost of keeping several litres of water and heavy blocks of metal at boiling point too.
It's high time espresso machines got a mechanicals simpler, cheaper, more environmentally friendly update. On the home front, Breville and Decent are doing this, while commercially I think some Ascaso machines use the same tech as Decent (not 100% sure on that though and when I reached out to them about it when considering one of their machines they just told me "work with your local dealer". There's exactly one Ascaso dealer in the country and they don't speak English so that wasn't much help).
Not to dismiss dual boilers or even good heat exchangers. Both of them are beautiful technological designs. But they basically haven't changed since the sixties.
I'm not sure I agree that they're mechanically complex. They're engineering 101. A pump, a heater and a thermostat. They're rather mechanically simple.
> Dual boiler machines generally cost thousands even for small home machines.
The _cheapest_ Decent is $3500.
> Commercial dual boiler machines will set you back at least $10-30k, easily.
You don't need a $10k-$30k machine to get a competent dual boiler. If you look at something like a Lelit Bianca, a dual boiler with preinfusion and flow control while $500 cheaper than the cheapest Decent, you can pull your first shot in 10 minutes. A home brewer making espresso on a Bianca isn't going to notice the difference on a $10k or $30k machine because at that price point what you're paying for isn't the ability to pull a shot, it's the ability to pull thousands of them every day of the year.
> But they basically haven't changed since the sixties.
That's true but I argue they don't need to. We don't need to iterate on everything. Technology doesn't always make things better.
Commercially, you do (I own a small cafe chain so I can claim some knowledge here). The Lelit Bianca is a beautiful home machine but you can't use it commercially - first of all, due to safety certs (not sure about the Bianca specifically but most small home machines don't have commercial certs). But also because it just isn't built to handle a morning rush of customers. I don't think you could make more than 10 or so lattes in a row before it would lose steam.
> I'm not sure I agree that they're mechanically complex. They're engineering 101. A pump, a heater and a thermostat. They're rather mechanically simple
I think that list is missing a few of the components that make up an espresso machine :)
https://66.media.tumblr.com/2a1cfb37655e5ddc1dfa820b15eefca9...
But nonetheless I agree, there are far more complex machines in regular use. My complaints are more about warm up time, hard limits on how many coffees you can serve in a row, and electricity use.
> That's true but I argue they don't need to. We don't need to iterate on everything. Technology doesn't always make things better.
I partially agree with this but again, from a commercial perspective I guess I have different goals. Actually at home I use a Flair 58 manual lever machine and a hand grinder. Beautifully simple and I could heat water using a wood fire and make it work.
But commercially, I want the tech I use to improve. I want better efficiency, better reliability, and lower energy use. I don't have the numbers for our yearly electric bill just from the coffee machine, but it's a lot and a good chunk of the day it just sits there reheating water over and over.
It's the same as saying you should never need to upgrade your work laptop. Wasn't the 720p screen you had in 2005 perfectly adequate? Why do you need more than 1gb RAM?
That said, boilers are pretty niche for home use. In order to maintain good thermal regulation you need a decent sized mass of water. That means a long time to preheat and a lot of wasted energy.
This isn't a dealbreaker for some, but for a casual consumer who pulls one or two shots per day, it's pretty lacking in convenience.
some prominent community members have rewritten a lot of the front end using python and JS.
when disagreements and call outs arose between this group and the owner, well, access to the company Basecamp is controlled by the owners. there are big personalities all around.
as somebody who enjoys a bit of the popcorn but is uninvested in the outcome, it's not a big deal as a consumer of the machine. if you want to hack on the software, his personality is probably going to affect you a little more.
of course, somebody else may step in to give a different historical account.