Are 3 hole steaming wand tips a con?

[MrFreddofrog]

Anyone noticed this?

This morning I discovered about 80% of the steam only comes out of the hole at the 4-5 o'clock position. A small amount of steam does come out of the other 2 holes but not much. It certainly isn't evenly distributed.

If I rotate the tip, most of the steam still only comes out of whatever hole is near the 4/5 o'clock position. Weird.

Articulating the wand or cleaning the tip and steam wand made no difference.

What do you think, is this an issue with my unit, or a wider BES920 issue or are 3 hole tips really just marketing BS?

[Dimal]

Hmmm...

Strange conclusion to make Freddo'...
More likely to be a physical partial blockage causing this.
The triple hole Tips I've used on a number of different machines, always have even distribution....

Mal.

[MrFreddofrog]

Yeah that's what I thought but blockage of what? I soaked the tip and cleaned both the inside of it and the 3 holes. Short of using an ultrasonic cleaner it's the cleanest it will ever be.

And the steam comes out of all the holes evenly as I rotate each hole paste the 4 o'clock position. Me no understand???

[MrJack]

One hypothesis -when you say "most of the steam" I presume you mean "most of the visible steam".

The visible steam is actually condensed water, which one might expect to preferentially flow through whichever hole is the lowest, particularly if the velocity is low...

[MrFreddofrog]

There's a lower hole at about 6.30/7 o'clock.

The third hole is around 11 ish

[MrJack]

Is there a bend in the wand? Bends do funny things to two-phase flows.

[MrFreddofrog]

Yeah, 2 x approx 120 degree bends.

[noidle22]

I have seen this problem reported with the 920, I think it was in the 920 owners thread. I've personally never seen it happen. Maybe check on the thread and see what others had to say.

The three hole tip on my BES900 works fine, as does the three hole tip on a La Pavoni I'm currently using. I recently worked on a San Marco 85 Sprint E that had a three hole tip and it was fine.

[MrFreddofrog]

Really? I just posted the question in the 920 thread. Didn't even think of searching through it. Hopefully someone with a good memory will remember and save me the effort of digging through 20 odd pages of it.