Refurbished Commercial Coffee Machines

Count the coffees in the busiest hour, not the day. One group suits a small shop, a secondary counter, a wine bar or a restaurant pouring espresso after service. Two groups is the working cafe standard, because it lets a barista texture milk while a shot runs, and it suits a tight bench or trade that is steady rather than spiky. Where it stops being the right answer is a hard peak with a queue that never clears, and that is why most cafes, and nearly all hotels and function venues, go to three groups.

Boiler capacity matters alongside group count, because steam is what runs out first when a queue forms. A machine that extracts well but cannot keep up with steam will bottleneck at the milk jug. Tell us the peak-hour number and we will match it against what is in stock.

Less than people fear, provided the brand is supported. These are plumbed, pressurised machines built to be serviced, with group gaskets, shower screens, seals and solenoids all treated as consumables. A machine that has been looked after has a long life ahead of it.

The risks are scale and parts. Ask about the water where the machine last worked and whether it ran behind a filter, and ask whether parts for that exact model are still available in Australia. Then ask us what was replaced during the refurbishment rather than what was tested.

Yes. A good machine with a poor grinder makes poor coffee; a modest machine with a good, well-adjusted grinder makes good coffee. If buying refurbished frees up budget, the grinder is where it should go.

Buy the grinder new or buy it refurbished from a brand with burrs available, because burrs wear and a grinder with unobtainable burrs is a short-term machine. Budget for burr replacement as a running cost, the way you would for filters.

Water in, waste out, and power that can carry it. The machine needs a plumbed water supply through a filter, a drain for the waste tray, and usually a dedicated electrical circuit — the requirement for each unit is on its product page, and some need a 15 amp outlet with its wider earth pin.

Get the plumbing and the power into the counter joinery before the counter is built. Opening up a finished counter to add a water point is the most avoidable cost in a cafe fit-out, and it is one of the most common.

It is the difference between a machine that lasts years and one that needs a boiler. Every espresso machine heats water, and hard water leaves scale behind in the boiler and the lines. Filtration also changes how the coffee tastes, so it is a quality decision as well as a maintenance one.

Put a filter in from the first day and change the cartridge on schedule rather than when something goes wrong. Ask us what filtration suits the water where the machine is going, and factor the cartridges into the running cost.

Daily: backflush the groups with the correct detergent, scrub the shower screens, clean the steam wands inside and out, and soak baskets and the portafilters. The steam wand is the one most often neglected and the one customers taste.

Then periodically: group gaskets, shower screens and seals as they harden, plus the filter cartridge. On a refurbished machine, find out what has just been replaced so you know where you are in that cycle. Keep a small stock of gaskets, because they fail at the start of a shift.

Often yes. Silverchef Rent-Try-Buy lets you rent the machine rather than pay for it outright, which keeps cash in the fit-out and makes the payments an operating expense. For a new cafe it is the most common way the biggest single machine on the counter gets paid for.

It also means group count is not a one-shot decision. If the morning rush outgrows a two group machine, you can step up rather than run two machines side by side. Ask us which of the units in stock can be put on a rental.