☕ - The hot beverage that powers the world!
Coffee gadgets - It's always great to learn about new gadgets. Please share your favorite hardware or full setups. It might inspire newcomers to experiment!
Local businesses - Please promote your local businesses. If you are not the owner of the business you are promoting, kindly ask the owner if it's okay. It would be great if the business has a physical store to include an exterior or interior shot.
I'd consider it from serviceability perspective. The boiler machines are fairly simple to understand even with PID control. There are Silvia parts all over the place and the machines are easy to service. Looking at the internals of the Ascaso, it's a bit of a different picture.
With that said, I think I like the idea of a thermoblock for steam specifically.
I have a breville bambino plus for the past 3 ish years which also uses a thermoblock. I like it. Lower power draw at idle, no preheat, works like a charm IMO.
I have an Oracle at home which is dual boiler and a bambino for the van. Yes there is a difference, is it worth the £1500 extra and the weight and fragility? Probably not. The coffee is great and unless you are really really serious about your coffee, water, puck prep then the difference is so minor there isn’t anything in it.
Would I pay the same amount for a thermoblock as a dual boiler? Nope.
For me, even the dual boiler is not worth it. A machine with a working PID (that has the offset documented and you can set it, not via vague presets) and you are set and properly equipped. Everything above are nice to have but unnecessary.
FWIW, Lance buys the machines himself using his patron funds and doesn't let manufacturers into his process. Most don't even know they're being reviewed unless he has issues or specific questions he can't get the answers to elsewhere. He's frankly more qualified to test and compare such features than nearly anyone else, since he has thousands of hours of stick time with hundreds of machines at this point.
To get back to the bulk of your question, in many other industries where water heating is done, there's cheap thermoblocks and good thermoblocks.
Double boilers have been around long enough that improvements today are incremental at best. Heat Exchangers and Thermoblocks on the other hand seem to be improving by leaps and bounds still, and Thermoblocks in particular are getting a lot of development in other industries.
It looks like Ascaso is using decent blocks and is properly PID controlling them. Obviously it's not going to be as stable as say a full brass double boiler, but the results seem to outperform most heat exchangers.
Value is tricky though. You're right, it's a crowded market at that price. Personally at this moment, given this review at face value I'd still go with a Silvia Pro X today. But I expect in a few more years heat blocks might be able to match performance with dual boilers for cheaper and with less work.
In the European market, it is priced similarly to a Lelit Bianca, which is the end game budget. The Silvia Pro X is about 400€ and the Elizabeth can be found for 900€ less, both new.
To me it seems that the pricing is just not right. And understand that I am not the target audience for this kind of machine.