Alright, let's talk about this psi per bar thing. It's one of those little conversions that you don't think much about, until you're suddenly staring at a piece of equipment and scratching your head. That's exactly what happened to me not too long ago, and I figured I’d share my little adventure.

My Little Dance with Pressure Units

So, I got my hands on this gorgeous, old Italian espresso machine. A real beauty, picked it up for a song. I was all excited to get it cleaned up and pulling shots. I managed to find a manual for it online, but here’s the kicker – it was all in Italian, naturally, and every pressure reading was in bar. Now, all my life, especially with car tires and my little workshop compressor, I've thought in psi. My trusty pressure gauge? Yep, psi only.

I was looking at this manual, trying to figure out the optimal brewing pressure, and it’s saying things like "9 bar." My first thought was, "Okay, how much is that in real money?" I mean, get it wrong, and you either get terrible coffee or, worse, make the machine do something unhappy. Didn't want to turn my kitchen into a steamy mess, you know?

My first instinct was to just kinda guess, but then I thought, "Nah, better be a bit more precise with this old girl." I’m not getting any younger, and my mental math for weird conversions isn't exactly lightning fast these days. I needed a practical way to switch between these two without pulling out a calculator every single time.

So, what I ended up doing was sitting down for a few minutes. I remembered there was a rough relationship, something I'd probably seen ages ago and forgotten. I didn't have an immediate chart handy right there in the kitchen, so I did a quick search on my phone – just once, mind you – to get the basic numbers straight. Then I tried to boil it down to something easy to remember for my day-to-day faffing about.

Here’s what I essentially committed to memory for my own use, nothing super scientific, just practical:

• For every 1 bar, you're looking at roughly 14.5 psi.
• So, if that espresso machine manual says 9 bar, I just mentally go 9 times 14.5. Okay, maybe I'd round it in my head to 9 times 15 for a quick check, which is 135 psi, then knock a bit off. Or I'd just do the 9 x 14.5 which is about 130.5 psi.

It's not rocket science, but it was my little process to get comfortable with it. The main thing was figuring out a system that worked for me, on the fly, without having to look it up every single time I wanted to check the pressure on that machine. It's made tinkering with that espresso machine, and a few other bits and bobs I've come across since, a whole lot simpler. Just thought I'd share my little journey with it. Sometimes it's these simple little hurdles that can be the most annoying if you don't have a go-to way to handle them.