Product Maintenance | How to Install Your Marco SP9 Coffee Brewer
The Marco SP9 opens up new menu offerings for your business as you may offer more coffees and batch sizes with the consistency you would expect of a properly trained barista. In this video, Steve walks through each step of the SP9 installation process, so you can get set up and brewing in a jiffy.
Transcript
Hey, it's Steve with Prima Coffee here. Today, I'm going to take a look at installing a Marco SP9 Brewer. The SP9 is a really excellent product that you can install in a cafe or even like a small restaurant or something that allows you to brew small cups of coffee or small batches of coffee on demand with really, really simple controls. And it's a great way to add by the cup brewing or small-batch brewing to whatever your coffee menu might look like. So, the SP9 consists of a few different parts that I have laid out here. The main thing is this undercounter boiler, this gets installed under the counter or out of sight and kind of out of mind and controls a lot of the whole brewing process. And that's really nice and convenient because obviously, having a large, kind of, bland stainless steel box on your counter isn't really the best way to treat your customers. So, what we actually have on the counter is this, this is the SP9 brew head. Every SP9 boiler is capable of hooking up two of these, so you can order a single or a double, and the installation changes just slightly depending on how many brew heads you use. We are actually going to use an SP9 brew head along with a single font, which is just a water delivery faucet. So, we'll get to that installation a little bit later.
Marco SP9 Coffee Brewers | Single or Twin Brew Head
Brew by-the-cup or small batches on demand
Featured Product
Again, you have your boiler, you have your SP9 brew head, and then we also have a bunch of different hardware pieces here. First thing I have are two mounting brackets. These are going to go under the counter and they're going to affix two screws that are found on the bottom of your SP9 brew head. They come with these wingnuts already in the box, so you have all the hardware that you need to install those brackets underneath your counter. We also have a couple of parts specifically for the brew head itself. So, we have a drain cover, we have an adjustable magnetic shelf, and then we have actually two brew heads. These are sort of shower screens. We have one that has multiple holes all in a circular arrangement that is sort of the main kind of default brew head. And we also have a Chemex or large kind of cone brewer specific brew head that has offset holes toward the front that kind of allow it to get a little bit more reach toward the center of the brewer should you be using a Chemex or a similar style brewer. We're also going to have a bit more hardware in the box. We've got some flexible drain lines. These are actually water supply or drain depending on what position on the brewer you're using. We have another flexible hose. This is intended as a drain hose. We have power and water hookups, so our power is 220, 20-amp and it uses an L6-20 receptacle.
So, you need to make sure that you have your power receptacle set up correctly for that or you have an adequate rated adapter for that. And then finally, we have a water supply line. Now, our water lines in this setting are actually going to be 3/8 inch PEX line. So, we have a push-fit connection. You'll want to make sure that you have the right adapters for whatever your water lines might be. A 3/8-inch compression or flare is quite often found for most water installations, but you might have something different. So, make sure that you're familiar with your water connections. And if you have any questions about what kind of adapters you might need, be sure to contact our sales team about that. Finally, I have a couple of sort of extra tools that I'll need here. I don't really need anything for this installation in terms of like screwdrivers or wrenches, but I will need a utility knife or even just a pair of snips or something. And that's to cut our lines. Obviously, the product manual is essential and this also has cutting templates for the holes that you need to drill. Now, the holes for the SP9 brew head, the standard brew head, are going to be 80 millimeters, which is just short of 3.75 inches. So, you're going to need a 3.75-inch hole saw or an 80-millimeter hole saw to drill the holes needed to mount this brewer into your countertop. You'll probably want to take care of that in advance, obviously, measure confidently, you know, measure twice, cut once.
Make sure that it is oriented the correct way that you want, place where you want because this is a, you know, somewhat big decision in terms of mounting something directly into your counter. Another consideration that you need to keep in mind is that the brew head needs fairly direct access to the boiler. You will want to mount it as close to directly on top of the boiler as you can. And that is to prevent heat loss while brewing and circulating as well as to prevent cavitation of water inside the lines. The closer you can get these two, the better performance you're going to have and the more reliable and consistent cups of coffee you're going to get. I'm going to plan on mounting this directly beneath the cuts in my countertop, and that is essentially what you should plan on doing as well. You do need some clearance here. Namely, there's a hard plastic fitting that actually communicates with the computer inside the boiler. So, maybe 4 to 5 inches of actual clearance at a minimum is best. We have almost a foot here and that's pretty good too. So, somewhere between that range, you know, you don't want to have to run your lines 3-feet, you want again, to be as close as possible to that boiler. The final couple of things that I need here are mainly for calibration. I just need a server or container that can hold at least 750 milliliters of water and a scale. That's going to be for me to check my delivery of water and make sure that I'm properly calibrated later on. So, I will need to be able to deliver 750 milliliters of water and check that weight or the volume to tell the brewer how to calibrate itself.
So, with all that in mind, let's move on to the installation. Okay. So, let's go over our kind of preliminary pre-install stuff. Again, you want to have a nice clear space where you're going to install your under-counter boiler. It should be close to your water supply. It should be close to a drain and it should be close to power and that all should be within just a few feet of your whole brewing setup ideally. For my situation here, I'm actually installing in a mobile sort of cart/island. So, my setup is a little bit different, but we'll talk about some of the more realistic, you know, permanent cafe installation settings. So, for me, I have a jerrycan for a drain and I am running water and power to my cart. They are hooked up to the wall, but I want this to be somewhat mobile and flexible, so I'm installing somewhat differently. But I do have plenty of space under my counter. I've got really easy access to where my holes are drilled and I will be able to place my boiler directly underneath those holes. And that again is key to this installation. So, the first thing that I'm going to do is actually install my water and my power on the boiler unit itself. So, there are two fittings on the underside of the boiler, basically on the front side. One for water and one for power. I'm going to run mine from front to back. I'm going to run both of them front to back. Again, you just need to make sure that you are running your water and power in such a way that they can fit your hookups, which should be nearby the boiler. So, I'm going to do water first and I just have this 3.75-inch nut and washer inside.
So, I just need to find the actual fitting on the underside of the boiler and screw that into place. And this is going to take a minute. Okay. So, I've got my water screwed in. Want to make sure it's nice and firm, that washer will help prevent leaks, but you also want to make sure that it's a little bit more than just finger tight. Okay. And hooking up power is quite easy. You have a three-pin plug and you just need to orient it correctly according to the corresponding fixture underneath the machine. Great. So, my boiler is all ready to basically fit into place. I'm going to place it into my cabinet here. And then we can talk about the on top of the counter fixtures and the SP9 brew head itself. On the top of my counter here, I have those two 80-millimeter holes pre-drilled. I have followed the cutting template provided in the manual and I've made sure that my holes are oriented so when I do install my SP9, it's nice and square with both sides of this counter. And it is placed in such a way that you know, this countertop is kind of deep. If I need to access the controls on the side of the SP9, I shouldn't need to reach too far, but I also should still be able to provide a little bit of counter space on the other side for the customer to grab their coffee if I want to serve it right there. So, keep that in mind as you're kind of measuring and thinking out how you install your SP9 brew head. So, mine will be placed roughly like so, which is just about halfway through the depth of my countertop.
Now, on the underside, we have four bolts and a drain tube and I have two mounting brackets. Now, they are different sizes and different designs. One of them, which is the front bracket, has a central hole plus two screw holes and the back bracket has just two screw holes in it. Both of these brackets will be mounted so that their kind of rubber pads are facing toward the underside of the countertop. And if you have a particularly thin countertop, the front bracket is designed such that you can reverse these plastic feet and pull these rubber pads out so you can get a little bit of extra depth and make sure that you're actually screwing on with enough torque on the actual bolts. For me, I don't need to do that. My countertop is quite thick at about 2 inches. So, I will have these ready. I will have my wing nuts ready. They're all the same size, so don't really need to worry too much about that. And that just means that I'm ready to run my data cable and all of my various protruding tubes down through my holes. And now, I'm ready to actually mount this and screw it down. So, once again, you know, just try to make sure that it's square and looks nice because once you've screwed it down, it's adjustable, but it's a little bit harder to fix. So, I'm going to make sure that I'm nice and square. It looks good to me. And now, I can go ahead and install my mounting hardware.
So, we're going to install our mounting brackets. I'm going to start with the back one first. That is just the one that has two holes. I want my rubber pads facing up. I'll just align those holes with my bolts and then I will screw on some wing nuts. There's one. So, now, we'll install our front bracket and just want to make sure that that center hole goes around the drain of the drain box. And same as before. We will just screw on our wing nuts. Okay. So, now, I've got my SP9 brew head installed into the countertop, which means that I'm ready to hook it up to the undercounter boiler. To do that, I have four hoses that I need to hook up. Now, conveniently, they're all labeled pretty clearly. We have an A and a B which correspond to A and B on the boiler. We have a drain which is unlabeled, but it's the drain hose that will run from the actual drain in the SP9, just in the counter. You can run that to your actual plumbed in drain, or in my case, I'm going to run it to a jerrycan just to collect the drain water. And then we finally have a vent, and actually only one SP9 brew head if you have two, needs to hook up to the vent on the boiler. If you have an SP9 and a font as I do here, again, only one of them needs to be connected to the vent. And that is there's only one vent position on the under-counter boiler itself so that all works out. I'm going to grab these hoses and hook them up. The only tool that you really need is a utility knife or perhaps a pair of snips or pliers or something like that. We just need to measure and cut our hoses and make sure that they are at the correct length for the installation. We do not want too much excess.
As I explained before, we really want to have as short a run for these hoses as possible. And that is mainly for temperature stability as you're brewing. While we're brewing, we are recirculating water back and forth between the brew head here. So, the shorter the distance, the better temperature stability we will have, and the better that temperature will be maintained from start to finish throughout the brew. So, I actually have pre-cut my hoses but we'll go under the counter now and set them up so you can see how to install this. Okay. So, under the counter here, we have these three barbs for our hoses and we also have this as the drain tube. So, you can't see the labels just because they're kind of in the counter right now, but we have A, B, and vent. And as I said, that corresponds to A, B, and vent on the under-counter boiler itself. So, as you are placing these hoses, all you really have to do is press-fit them on, just push firmly, slide them fully into place. They don't need hose clamps and they don't really need much of anything to hold them in place. There's not a lot of water pressure involved here, so you can basically just get away with pushing them straight on and they should be fine. The next step would be to make sure that we have measured and properly cut our hoses prior to affixing them to the undercounter boiler. This hose is somewhat flexible but it will crimp if it bends too far. So, make sure that you don't have any considerable bends because that will inhibit the flow and you really want to make sure that it is a nice smooth run. I will also affix my drain hose for the drain box itself right now. And that is also just a push-fit. Just make sure it goes on nice and firmly.
And if you have about maybe 3/4 of an inch to an inch should be called set. So, let's look at affixing it to the boiler itself. Once again, we want to make sure that we're hooking up our A to the A position on the under-counter boiler. And just as before, just press firmly and slide that tube fully into place. We will do the same with B as well as our vent tube. So, here's my B tube, slide that down fully. Our vent tube I'm going to run all the way over here, and once again, just press down for a firmly. We also want to connect our data connection here. So, you'll notice we have three pins and this little tooth cut out. So, you just want to align that with the actual plug, push down firmly and then the outer sort of collar will twist to lock it into place. Now, I can also hook up my single font tower that I have as well. The connection for that is just an A connection. So, I will take my tube which again, is already pre-measured and cut. But just as before, you want to make sure that it's as short of a run as possible with no kinks in the line and a fairly smooth or straight run. Just push down firmly and make sure it is well-situated. Now, the font also has a data connection. Same thing. Just align it with the actual receptacle. Push down and then twist that collar. We can clean up our lines just a little bit here. The font also has a drain line which I will run over to my receptacle, my jerrycan for my drain. So, that's it. We're actually already to set up and connect to our main water and power connections and then we can go through our initial setup and calibration.
If I want to run my drain line directly to my plumbed drain, all I need to do is put that flexible line into a drain or receptacle, whether that's on the floor or a little bit higher up on the wall like this one is. So, we're going to hook up our water connection next. Briefly just to talk about the water supply that you need for the SP9, for sure we recommend hooking up to a water treatment system. I have a reverse osmosis system that is doing quite a lot of filtration for my water. You might not need reverse osmosis for your setup, but you should be considering treating your water to make sure that it's appropriate for coffee brewing and that it will protect your equipment and make sure that it's not breaking down due to scale or something like that. On the end of my water line here, I have a valve and then I have a 3/8-inch John Guest, you know, quick fitting or a Shark Bite, whatever you want to call it. Again, I'm using a 3/8-inch PEX line to hook up my water. You might have something different, you might have a different fitting. So, just make sure that you have the right adapter for the water line on your machine. For me, all I need to do is take my 3/8-inch PEX line and press it firmly into place. Make sure it's nice and snug. And then next, I can hook up my power. So, I'm going to plug in my power. I have an L6-20 twist lock plug and 20 amp, 220-volt receptacle in the wall as well. So, I just need to align my pins, plug in, and give a short twist. Now, we are set up and ready to start our boiler. So, once we've hooked up our power and turned on our water supply, we are ready to go. The boiler is going to take maybe up to an hour to fully fill and heat and get completely ready for first use. So, give it a bit of time to warm up and fill up. It's going to basically fill and heat in stages, but giving it a full hour or so is probably the best bet in order to get the best performance out of it.
Now, a quick little setup tip. If you want to change the temperature for your water to be heated and held at, you just need to hold this top power button and the little gear button simultaneously for about a second, it'll go into User Setup. Now, the top button will basically scroll down through our options and then the gear button will change the options. I just need to change my set temp. So, the maximum is actually 204 degrees. So, if I hit one more, it's going to go down to 140. I can hold and kind of cycle up through the numbers. And if I want to set it to somewhere between 200 and 204, that is probably the best bet. I'm going to set it back to 204, that's kind of where I like it. The reason the maximum temperature is 204 degrees is basically because there are a couple of pumps that are cycling water and they experience some cavitation issues. Basically, they'll form water bubbles because they're pressurizing this hot water. Two hundred and four seems to be the best maximum temperature for that. If you are at a higher altitude, you might actually want to set this lower just depending on how the pump is performing. If you're seeing a lot of bubbles, you might need to set the temperature a little bit lower. Now, I can scroll down through the bottom of the screen and go and Save an Exit. And now, I am actually ready to calibrate my brew head. Okay. We're in the home stretch now. I have brew head set up, I've got my font set up. It is time to basically get the brew head set up, just the final stuff like placing my drain grate in place.
My magnetic shelf I can place here as well. You can set that wherever you need it to be. But actually, for now, I'm going to set it aside because I need to do a calibration. And what that means is I'm going to dispense 750 milliliters of water and I'm going to measure the output and then I'm going to tell the brewer how much water it actually output when it did that. So, I do need to insert a brew head. I'm just going to use the standard one. Really the only trick here is there's this tab and a little notch and those align directly at the back. So, just check underneath, check where this goes, and then you just sort of press-fit it, make sure the little notches align correctly. All right. Here we are. Nice and easy. That's in place. So, I have my carafe that I'll set up here. Or actually, I'm going to tear the weight first, so I know how much output I get. All right. There we go. Set it in place...all I have to do is take my top dial, which is my volume. I'm going to set it all the way to the maximum, which is 750 milliliters. My bottom dial, I'm going to set to two and a half minutes between the two and three. And then all I need to do now is just push my Go lever once. It will go through the cycle, it will dispense 750 milliliters of water in nine pulses across that two and a half minutes. And then all I need to do is once it's finished and it beeps again, I will take my carafe, I will measure the output on my scale and then I'm going to tell the brew head how much water it gave me. So, let's say it gives me 762, I will program in the calibration mode 762 milliliters. It will use that information to adjust its output the next time.
If I need to go through a couple of calibration cycles, I can. Often one to two is probably enough. The brewer does a pretty good job of getting close within target, usually within 5 to 10 milliliters. Outside that, you know, you might need to adjust your water or possibly check the temperature of your brewer, but it should do a pretty good job of getting really close to that target weight the first time. So, let's come back when it's finished. Okay. So, our brew cycle just finished. I'm going to weigh my output, and I have 756 grams. So, in order to tell the brewer what it just gave me, I need to go into calibration mode. And to do that, I'm going to hold down the brew lever until it beeps at me three times, and then immediately, I'm going to start entering information. And I do that by pushing down the lever basically in each digit of the weight that it gave me. So, first it will be hundreds then tens and then singles. So, if I need to tell it it's 756, I'm going to hit it seven times, wait until a beep, hit it five times, wait until a beep, and then six times and wait until a final beep. So, let's do that right now. Hold down 'till I get three beeps. Then one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five. And finally six. And there we are. We've entered our calibration and we are ready to start brewing. Okay. So, now that our calibration is done, I'm ready to brew. I'm going to get a server and a dripper set up here. I'll just set my server in place and then I'm going to adjust my shelf more or less to accommodate my dripper. I want it to be fairly close to the brew head. I'll load it up real quick with 30 grams of coffee. It looks like a little tight. That should be good.
Okay. So, in order to tell it how much water I want, I'm doing 30 grams, so I want about 500 milliliters. I'll dial my top dial, my milliliters, my volume down to number five. And then I want this to finish in right around three minutes. So, I'll set it to three. I'm using a December dripper here, so I'm going to actually open it up to the third hole, basically the highest flow rate, and then I just hit go. And that's it. If I'm in a coffee shop, that means that I'm free to go and take some other orders or perhaps some other beverages. Maybe get a mug and a server ready for the customer that I'm about to serve. The SP9 really is a nice addition to your cafe workflow because it allows you to brew a pretty good consistent cup of coffee or small batch of coffee reliably. You can dial in your recipe fairly easily. Again, you just have that volume and the time dial. So, once you have it up and running, it's going to stay fairly reliable and consistent. One thing that we haven't really talked about yet is the font. Again, I just took that one water line up, and the way that this works is it has a single button on top. This is the only style font that works with the SP9.
It has a single button on top and it basically just delivers hot water on demand. So, I can press that button, deliver hot water, I can use that to preheat a mug, fill a server, fill up a kettle and set it aside to start heating for a pour-over brew, rinse a filter in a coffee dripper, all kinds of things. It's a very nice sort of versatile feature to have alongside your SP9 brewer. So, we'll let this finish brewing and then we can kind of wrap things up. So, my brew has just finished. I've got a pretty decent looking brew bed there and it finished right on time. So, we are all set, and we're ready to go. So, hopefully, this video helped you get your SP9 installed and kind of helped you kind of figure out how everything works and covered all the tips that you needed. If you do have any trouble or you're hitting any snags, feel free to give us a call or contact us. Our sales team is always happy to help for things like this and we hope that you're really happy and satisfied with your new Marco SP9. Thanks for watching.
