Silvia

First of all you need a grinder. I recommend the eureka mignon line of grinders because there is one at every price point, albeit those price points start at about $350 and go to $1k-ish. But truly this is your must have purchase. The Specialita is what started their popularity because they are so q

I always wonder why more people don't do that.Even if you'd buy two brand new Rancilio Silvia and use one exclusively for steam and the other one for Espresso it would be still cheaper than a wide range of dual boiler... The only downside is shelf real estate and having to explain this brilliant ide

I'm also a former barista and had the same setup until really recently. It's a decent combination. I'd recommend upgrading the steam wand to a rancilio Silvia wand. The wand costs about $20 online and takes about an hour to replace. There's videos online detailing how to do it.

I think that’s the same as my Gaggia, 2013. You may be able to fit the Rancilio Silvia steam want onto this machine. Big upgrade.

Yeah, coming from the Bambino, you would definitely notice the difference since steaming on the Bambino is much easier. The Rancilio Silvia steam wand is very powerful, which makes it harder to control at first. What I can say is that it just takes time and practice to get used to it and learn how t

A better machine is going to have a boiler instead of the thermocoil in your Bambino. The good news is it will have much more steam power, and will steam faster than your Bambino. The bad news is that you will have to wait about a minute for the boiler to heat up from brew to steam temperature befor

Rancilio Silvia. Would not recommend. Finicky as stock, either need to faff around with temp surfing or go extra $200 for PID and whatnot. Steam wand o-ring gave up within a year, became rusty on the "stainless steel" base in 5 years despite me doing all the maintenance described in the manual. Ther

I’ll answer some! Yes, gaggiuino/gaggimate has PID and pre infusion. I think pre-infusion is only in Gaggimate Pro. (I’ll just talk about gagimate, go that route since its more user friendly from what i read here, even the community is more friendly) I know it works on all types of GCP since 1991. Y

Like the other reply said, that’s the original with the cover off. But you CAN put the Rancilio Silvia steam wand on these (or at least the ECP which this is pretty similar to, so I assume it works with these too). It’s not hard, but there’s a couple of steps that are sort of annoying.

Honestly there is no massive upgrade for the GCP under $1000, it's a very capable machine. Are you interested in a lever? That would at least give you a different experience. Are you a tinkerer? You could mod your GCP and turn it into a $3k+ flow profiling beast. Other than that, you're probably tal