Another thing I do is heat the espresso head plus the cups by placing them in boiling water from the kettle for a short while before extracting. Makes the coffee in the cups stay nicely hot afterwards. We only have a lower end Sunbeam machine, but hot coffee can be made in a couple of minutes without leaving the machine on for a long time to heat it all up.

Try this …

First heat a small cup of milk in the microwave. Turn the machine steam wand on, and wait for steam to emit. Then dip the end of the steam wand in and out of the milk while keeping the tip near the surface, this’ll foam the milk nicely.

That’s great news. Drilling a hole though? I fitted a Powerline adapter to get internet out to our sleepout. You won’t get full speed like you would with a cable, but no holes in floor needed. That said, for an office you probably need decent speed.

Did you get it working?

That clearly is a RTFM situation …

Crickey 12 hours, that’s interesting as residual current would normally be drawn after power removed. Depending on the voltage on the capacitor a resistor would discharge it. Make sure it’s not pulling too much discharge current if you try that.

Don’t underestimate your power as a barista!!

If the grind is too fine, the espresso machine won’t have enough pressure or time to force the hot water through. On my setup, I had to experiment to find the optimal grind to suit my machine.

Whatever you end up doing, it’ll taste much better than 99% of coffee shops.

Espresso does need a fine grind, the hot water is only there for around 15 seconds, and the fine grind is needed to give that a full flavour.

Can I suggest you get some espresso grind and work from there. Fill the head with the ground coffee and compress it quite firmly. After compress it’ll leave a small gap (few mm) at the top of the head. Use more coffee next time if the gap is too big. The double head will give 2 shots at a time. Either combine them into a single cup, or use 2 cups with one shot each.

I never use the milk frother, just splash a dash of oat milk onto the top.

A reset sometimes needs the button held depressed for a while, 10-30 seconds.

Your journey into nice coffee is underway, I don’t think you’ll regret getting a decent espresso machine.

One further step that really did give an improved flavour for us was getting a grinder. We bought a Breville Dose Control during a Briscoes sale. Our coffee maker is not Breville but the control over the grind size and duration makes it very easy and repeatable.

I look forward to reading any updates on this, time to start trying different coffees ☕️

The Spade Toothed Whales are interesting but because of their rarity, very little is known about them, and their habitat preferences.

The oceans, given their extreme depths in some places, must contain many creatures never seen by man before.

I bet you could hear them sh*ting themselves !!

No need to repost it, thanks. There’s something seriously amiss in their operating procedures and their ground crew management imo. How could even un-specialised contractors think it ok to remove more than a few nuts at a time?

I’d guess the contractors were not properly instructed. This brings a point, who were the contractors working on this? Did they have any relevant experience, or were they simply casual labour?

I’d expect all procedures to be fully documented and importantly regimented into crews. But seemingly not in this case, how the hell could this happen?

Occam’s Razor strikes again.

There are, I guess, 4 tower feet, they are very big structures. So my guess is that the “workers” were told remove the leg bolts, sand-blast the foot, then renew the bolts.

“Now guys, I’m off for a smoko, have it done before I’m back”. “OK guv”.

Instead of doing it one foot at a time, the obvious method, the “workers” then rush off, “Hey Mick, you do leg one, Jim you do leg 2, Manuel you do leg 3, Franco you do leg 4”. “OK let’s go”.

In 10 minutes all the bolts are removed, the wind picks up, the lateral force on the cables increases and bang, down she goes.

We’ve got a huge power outage up here in the Far North, seems there’s a Transpower problem cutting off power to the whole of the Far North.

Luckily we have a UPS for Internet until the battery runs down.

Edit: It’s still off after 2 hours. Apparently a transmission pylon tower collapsed, no further info, but oh boy, this will likely take a while to fix I suspect.

Edit2: Power came back on after around 5 hours.

I had my flu/covid booster on 11 April this year. It’s only appeared on MMH very recently. I have to say MMH, both the web based and app, isn’t that good imo, especially the iPad app.

I can see those vaccination records were added by a nurse at our GP, even though they were done at a vacc centre.

I have an app/web link to Manage My Health. All of my medical things, like prescriptions, vaccinations, blood test results, and doctor visit reports are logged, and are available on-line. I can see when each of my Covid vaccines were given.

I may be wrongly assuming everyone in NZ has online access to their medical info, idk.