There be espresso here, captain!
After nearly of year of downtime, my espresso machine is finally back up. It took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong. Mainly, I just didn’t want to consider that the heat exchanger had failed inside the boiler. Once I determined that it was probably the boiler, it took me several months of trying on and off to locate a replacement.
It turns out that most of the specialty espresso shops only care to carry the parts that they list – or to service people who bought their machines from them. I was very dissapointed with several shops who’d previously seemed reliable. I have to highly reccomend 1st-line equipment. They hooked me up with a used boiler – and offered to order a new one, but let me know that they take a couple of months to show up from Italy.