Refurbished a Bezzera Galatea Domus

I inherited this 2008-era beast from a family friend almost 10 years ago now. It had clearly seen better days but I held off doing any major work on it as long as I could. It recently sprung a major leak from the boiler and so I decided to take the plunge and try to get it back up and running.

The boiler was incredibly scaled up with multiple fittings seeming to have leaked and plugged themselves over the years. I have only used filtered water but the damage was already done. One of these was so frozen it snapped off when I was trying to remove it so I ended up needing to replace the whole boiler. I descaled the original boiler anyway and it came up looking pretty good so I’m bummed I couldn’t reuse it. The metal frame had rust everywhere from previous leaks.

Once I got everything apart I descaled the remaining pipes (very satisfying), ground off the rust from the chassis and repainted it. A lot of the plastic covers on the spade plugs were cracked so I replaced all of these as well. The group head was in decent condition after descaling, I just replaced the shower screen and all the o rings. I polished the stainless steel case with metal polish and foam pads. The front cover was really scratched up so I decided to sand it to try to restore the mirror finish which I now regret. I got it most of the way there but had many failed attempts and spent way too much time and sanding pads on this part!

After about 6 weeks of waiting for parts from Europe, the reassembly was relatively straight forward with a spanner and plumbers tape, thanks to taking a heap of photos of the original condition. I ended up spending about $600 AUD and I figure I have already gotten more than this value from the machine since I got it for free. Over half of this was the new boiler.

This was a somewhat scary but ultimately really satisfying project and I learned a lot about how these E61 machines work. The coffee tastes great and seeing clear water come out of the hot water tap is a great feeling.