I owned a Breville Dual Boiler for a few years, was always happy with the coffee it produced, and I thought it was very good value for the price... until it failed in a manner that caused it to constantly trip a GFCI. I brought it back to the shop where I bought it (who service all varieties of espresso machines), and they told me that Breville won't sell them parts for repair. I then contacted Breville, and they wanted me to ship it back to them for maintenance, at a cost of several hundred dollars. So I wound up with one of those much-more-expensive Italian machines, which has now seen daily use for a few years and not needed anything more than a replacement group head gasket (which cost $10 and any idiot can replace one at home).

Don't disagree, and I realize this isn't the solution for most people, but home-barista.com has some excellent forums on how to make the most common repairs yourself.

For a tripped GFCI, dollars-to-donuts you had a leaky o-ring on your boiler, which was letting steam into the innards of your machine. The replacement parts can be acquired very cheaply and there are great YouTube videos on how to do the repairs.

With the BDB there are a couple of primary failures after a couple years (failed o-rings, pump or solenoid that needs replacement, new grouphead gasket), which have fortunately been well-documented in online forums and YouTube.

I used my fathers Rancillio Silvia for 10ish years after he used it for about that long. It’s still good but I have upgraded. It had a US$70 service after about 15k coffees and was still fine at 20k. It’s got a little surface rust on the drip tray. Fantastic machine.

This pales compared to some machines though - I was recently reading about someone has a ‘60s Faema e61 that has made nearly 5 million coffees.

https://www.home-barista.com/advice/faema-e61-original-vinta...

Lance Hedrick (latte art champion YouTuber guy) raves about the BDB and would be my top choice if I don’t already have another model.

In addition to being great and having features of more expensive machines it can be trivially modded for flow profiling. You can now do what decent/slayer/lever owners do and pressure profile. Ok maybe it doesn’t quite compare to those but they are a multiple of the price, and now you can do the coffee shots, turbo shots, blooming shots and all that fun stuff.

If mine breaks down and I’m not in the mood to spend $5k on a machine id get the dual boiler.

100% agree, we bought ours a couple of years ago along with a separate grinder and it’s absolutely amazing. We bought the espresso machine for half price which was a steal (approx $950AUD instead of $1800). Literally never buy takeaway coffee anymore, most of the time if we do end up buying coffee out its far inferior to the coffee we make at home with fresh locally roasted beans. Definitely has paid for itself, make 1-2 coffees a day since December 2019 with no issues, and it’s very to clean.