[beenBoutIT]

The metal content is the main difference, DeLonghi (and every other popular home espresso machine )are almost entirely made of plastic. Boiling water in plastic leaches harmful chemicals into the espresso and add subtle flavors that shouldn't be there. The DeLonghi level machines are built to last a few years and be replaced while the commercial machines can easily outlive their owners.

[carlob]

My Delonghi has a fair share of metal, has lasted me 8 years already and doesn't seem to show much in terms of wear.

Now let's suppose it dies now, it would have cost me 10 euros per year. I would have to keep a Roncilio for 64 years to get the same bang for the buck. I'm starting to think that maybe it's a volume problem, you need to make coffee for at least 10 people daily and then you might see a difference.

Also I think that living in a place where a good espresso costs less than a euro makes it kinda hard to justify a coffee machine that costs almost as much as a used car... :)

[smueller1234]

At the same time I heard at least certain years of the Silvia used solder with lead. shrug Pick your poison?

[nosianu]

I had an almost unused 2012 model still lying around and had it tested by a local government lab. I took the water sample myself (so it does not officially count because it's not "certified") but after speaking with the head of the lab about the procedure.

Result: Waaaayyyy over the (German) limits for lead in drinking water.

I wanted to sell it but added to the post that I wanted to wait for the results, and that I would scrap it and not sell it if there was lead. There were several people who still wanted to buy it. As someone who has had to have treatment with chelators, albeit against mercury, I have seen what those academic and abstract warnings "there is no amount of lead (or mercury) that does not do damage" mean in practice: With my (university clinic researcher) doctor's consent I continued chelation far beyond any of the "limits" (i.e. when tested levels had fallen below any official limits in urine or blood I still continued, for years). It STILL had an effect, and it was recognizable in objective symptoms, not just subjective ones.

For almost 100% of people the dangers of lead (or heavy metals or environmental poisons in general) are way too abstract to be taken seriously. I've given up - actually I never really seriously tried, and if so only by short comments such as these and never to anyone in person in order to not ruin relationships - to convince anyone. Those poisons don't make you sick in small quantities, they just, very, very gradually, make you function worse. Since this is 100% correlated with aging, since it takes a long time, all those effects will a) be part of your life, you got used to it gradually, b) attributed to age. Only if you do were to do something really extreme such as what I did (had to, was forced to by circumstances) would you be able to see a difference. For what it's worth, my doctor too thinks this is vastly under-recognized and a much bigger problem than even the vast majority of doctors think. The only reason I now it was not "stress" or "age" is because a long list of quite common ailments is completely gone now, from occasional small localized short cramps to psoriasis to warts to only mention three common ones.

I would not buy that machine. There are lead-free alternatives. I have a Vibiemme Domobar (with PID). This particular machine uses copper everywhere, even all the small parts of the E61 brewing group, which I've only ever seen with brass parts everywhere else. I had its water tested too, no lead whatsoever, but elevated copper - which is a non-issue (the body has far better mechanisms to handle copper, since it's an essential metal, reflected in the official limits in drinking water, which are several orders of magnitude higher for copper).

[q3k]

> Result: Waaaayyyy over the (German) limits for lead in drinking water.

Is this a sensible comparison to make? You will likely be drinking at most 120ml (4 shots) of rancilio espresso per day, which is around 4% of your daily ~3L recommended water intake.

How high were the results, anyway?

[mschuster91]

> Is this a sensible comparison to make?

There is no such thing as "safe lead exposure limit".

[carlob]

> ~3L recommended water intake.

This is a myth. You're supposed to have around 2 l of water, from all sources: meaning that you'd have to eat only freeze-dried food to actually need that much water.