There has been a huge change that has taken place in the construction of Breville's Dual Boiler machines as of mid 2022, the models involved are the BES920, BES980 and BES990.
As many people who own one of these machines probably know, and those that don't have no doubt read about it, they have been plagued by leaking o-rings on the steam boiler which can cause a variety of problems and is the leading cause of breakdowns, usually within only a few years.
Around 3 years ago, Breville replaced the heat exchanger tube fittings on the steam boiler with leak free compression fittings as these were usually the main failures. This was good, however, there still remained many o-rings on the other tubes which eventually leaked.
As of mid 2022, Breville have completely changed both the coffee and steam boilers and all of their sensors and tubes to be compression fittings (photo attached of a BES980).
What this means is that there is no longer any o-rings on either of the boilers to leak. This is going to dramatically increase their reliability. The earliest machine I currently know of to have the new boilers is date code 2228 (28th week of 2022) and Breville said they change was fully implemented as of late 2022. (To find your date code, read the serial number and the first four numbers you come across after the "A1BAAESA" or similar string is the year/week).
The centre of the steam probes does still seem to be an o-ring though, these have been failing a lot recently. I'm not sure if this is a new design as well or if it's the same, I would assume this has been changed to improve reliability if they've gone to such effort for the rest.
I suspect Breville will have to increase the retail price on their machines to recoup some of the millions they will have spent on this change so don't be surprised if you see this in the coming months. It's well worth it though.

As many people who own one of these machines probably know, and those that don't have no doubt read about it, they have been plagued by leaking o-rings on the steam boiler which can cause a variety of problems and is the leading cause of breakdowns, usually within only a few years.
Around 3 years ago, Breville replaced the heat exchanger tube fittings on the steam boiler with leak free compression fittings as these were usually the main failures. This was good, however, there still remained many o-rings on the other tubes which eventually leaked.
As of mid 2022, Breville have completely changed both the coffee and steam boilers and all of their sensors and tubes to be compression fittings (photo attached of a BES980).
What this means is that there is no longer any o-rings on either of the boilers to leak. This is going to dramatically increase their reliability. The earliest machine I currently know of to have the new boilers is date code 2228 (28th week of 2022) and Breville said they change was fully implemented as of late 2022. (To find your date code, read the serial number and the first four numbers you come across after the "A1BAAESA" or similar string is the year/week).
The centre of the steam probes does still seem to be an o-ring though, these have been failing a lot recently. I'm not sure if this is a new design as well or if it's the same, I would assume this has been changed to improve reliability if they've gone to such effort for the rest.
I suspect Breville will have to increase the retail price on their machines to recoup some of the millions they will have spent on this change so don't be surprised if you see this in the coming months. It's well worth it though.

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