Put $400 into a fancy espresso machine mod that made worse coffee for 3 months

I bought a used Gaggia Classic last year and got into all the online forums about modding it. Everyone swore by the PID temperature controller kit, so I dropped $120 on one and spent a weekend wiring it up. After that the shots ran sour no matter what I did. Messed with the settings for three months, bought a $60 grinder upgrade trying to fix things, wasted bags of beans. Finally took it to a shop in Portland where a tech told me I installed the thermocouple wrong and it was reading 8 degrees off the whole time. He fixed it in 20 minutes for free. Has anyone else sunk money into a DIY upgrade that actually made things worse?

2 comments

2 Comments

kais6717d ago

Used to think PID kits were basically plug-and-play magic, but your story got me rethinking that. I nearly grabbed one for my Silvia last month but held off after reading about guys like you struggling with installs. Makes me wonder if half the hype online is just people who got lucky with their wiring.

charlie_allen17d ago

That Portland tech sounds like a lifesaver. Did he say how common that kind of install error is, or if the Gaggia board is just finicky about thermocouple placement? I've seen a few folks on r/espresso say they ripped their PID kit out after a month because the temp swings were still wild.