Many of you might own a Delonghi espresso machine, and you must love it! Cleaning the Inffuser or also the regularly called brew unit might be tricky, but we have it all laid out for you.  

Disassembly 

For this, you will need a Phillips number two screwdriver. 

Starting, you need to identify a horseshoe-shaped clip on top of the unit. Notice that the little indents are near the bottom and will slide right out. Following is this piston assembly. The Piston can be very stiff if there are many buildups. Then take a poke and pry the seals as they shed their coats of dried crusty coffee. You can probably see the screen now.

 

A single screw in the middle of a lift it up here, and you can see how much gunk it has. As they either get clogged up with old coffee oils or occasionally, they'll begin to bend. So the edges don't seal properly here, and then coffee grits can get beneath and into your coffee. So when you pull this off, be aware that there is a valve inside, and it's pushed up by a spring. And the pressure coming in and must defeat the spring to pass by creates a little back pressure and promotes the production of a nice Crema. And then this is a tiny hole that the coffee will come out eventually end up coming out the spouse of the machine into your cup here. Sometimes they're stuck in there, so poke them out nicely.

 

Be careful, though; it's just a little plug and can fly across the room! And if it's lost, you will have to order a new one. But if you're careful, you can get this retaining plug off and take out spring in there. So you will clean that up too, and that's it for the disassembly here. 

Cleaning & Reassembly

Now, clean all the components carefully. Get all that old grease off just a little bit of soap! Now you need to assemble it back again. So first, install the new gaskets onto the Piston; make sure they're free of any fragments, add protection, and that's all there is to it for installing the gaskets.

 

And next, put in a new shower screen. Again, make sure you clean your hands off, and they're not full of grease from the cleaning process. So you don't block all these tiny holes there. It's a beautiful piece of precision engineering, and you don’t want to damage it. So before you put the shower screen on, however, you’re going to have to put the spring back in here.

And there's a little retaining plug. Some of these might jump out just from the spring pressure. So keep your finger pressed on it until you get the shower screen in place and screw it. 

So now, take a substantial portion of food-safe machinery grease and wipe it down the length of the shaft. It is okay to go a little bit overboard here since this is where all the friction surfaces are. Now, you’re ready to put it back in! 

Take care not to come up to the surface of the shower screen. And so the third element here, the little slide bar, is also pretty understandable, which alignment it goes into as cutouts for this little post slides right in there.

Now, take the little horseshoe clips and clip them in there. And that retains the sliding bar inside the Piston. And now you’re done!

If you are looking for the replacements seals and shower screen filter, click below to visit our website!

  • Delonghi Brew Unit Complete Rebuilt Kit - HERE.
  • Delonghi Seals - HERE. 
  • Delonghi Infuser for ESAM models - HERE.
  • Delonghi Infuser for ECAM models- HERE.

 

Watch our video to see the step by step of the process.