Plumbing in the Nuova Simonelli Musica (well, sort of!)

I have reported here in the past about my trouble with plumbing in the Nuova Simonelli (yes, I have the plumb-in version): http://coffeekind.com/reading-room/blog/another-machine-problem-nuova-si.... Like I have said, what I did was just dropping the Musica's hose into a water container. It was smooth sailing until I started to have some problem with water metering; the Musica did not deliver the correct amount to water and cut the shot short of completion. I think the main problem was the Musica lost the priming and started to introduce air into the piping. A few people here suggest that I should use a bottled water pump such as a Flojet and an accumulator to provide the positive water pressure to the Musica.

I thought really hard about this option and since moving to the new place, it seem that space is at a premium and have more gears for coffee is not going to cut it with the wife. So I decided that I either need to plump the machine directly into the water line (with filters of course) or devise some way to give the Musica positive water pressure. 

So this is what I did,  I'm still going to feed it with water from a container but instead of just dropping the hose into the container, I'm drilling a hole at the bottom of the container, and connect a 1/4'' plastic ice-maker line to it. Since the hose on the Musica is the size of the garden hose, I needed some adaptor for it. Several trips to my nearest Home Depot resulted in me finding some obscure adaptors. 

My tip to people who might look into doing something similar is to ask for help when you are at a hardware store; it took me a lot of time to find the right adaptor and the people at Home Depot were very helpful at pointing me to the right direction. With that said, it was not a very smooth sailing, as there were several small leak I had to deal with in which case the wrenches and more teflon tape were my best friends. But atlas, I have a good size injury to my finger to prove it!

After several hours of leak test, I'm confident that my setup is working properly. The water container is located higher than the machine which by the force of gravity will provide the machine with postive water pressure; also with the virtue of the location of the hose, the machine will not lose prime and introduce air into the pipe. So far, the Musica pump is running quieter than before and the preinfusion function is working as it should because there is positive pressure. 

I'm hopeful that this is the solution to my problem. If there is a problem that occur in the future, then I will need to plumb it into the main line which is a bit more complicated. But I'm hoping for the best!