At 16 months, unit continues to work dependably again I would say 90% of time. Other 10% implies give it a cleaning and its back in action. Based on another solid month of good service raising from 3 star to 4 star for dependability and use. Coffee taste was always a 4 star review.While the Latte-Go does froth milk decently, we have switched to using this for our milk froth and reserve the Philips to making espresso's and coffee only. The device shown below really takes frothing to another Starbucks like level and its much less finicky than using the Philips. See my review on this product below. Been using this now for like 7 months. Between these 2 machines very happy with our coffee drinks now.Maestri House Milk Frother, Variable Temp and Froth Thickness Frother and Steamer, 21OZ/600ML Smart Touch Control Milk Warmer, Dishwasher Safe, Memory Function for Latte Cappuccino, Hot ChocolateStripping out some older review content due to space allowances.......--------------------------14 month update. What a difference a month makes! At 13 I was completely ready to write this machine off. I was exhausted with its constant maintenance and cleaning needs and very iffy results that it would work properly even after that time consuming maintenance. It was 50/50 at best that the machine might work properly. For this entire 14th month, I would say 90% of the time this machine works without any issue. The rest of the time, some basic normal cleaning and light greasing of the o-rings corrects whatever the issue is and it's off and working again. The only thing I can think of timing wise which fits into this complete turn around in the machines behavior is that I completely disassembled the brew group to its entirety (watch you tube video), deep cleaned and scrubbed each piece and then regreased brew group and o-rings with a new grade of of safe silicone grease (Haynes Silicone Grease, Food Grade Sanitary Lubricant). I was using the Philips brand grease previously. Since then coffee making is a bliss again. I still don't really believe the turn around, but seeing is believing! Raising my total review back to 3 stars based on latest performance. I need some further protracted good performance history for upgrading its score beyond this. We will see. Leaving earlier review(s) down below for contrast and explanation of previous issues and reviews.---------This is my 13 month product review of the Philips EP3241 Latte Go automatic coffee maker.Below all the plus signs down below is my original 1 year review. Between there and here is my 13 month update. Also had to trim some of my previous 1 year review text to fit the 20,000 char posting limit...Taste of coffee from this maker still rates a 4 star review. When the machine *works* its makes a very good cup of joe. The bad new is that it doesn't always work. In fact, it seems to be taking an increasing amount of work from me to keep this beast going. I like to putz with stuff *to a degree* but I don't think most buyers will be appreciative of the effort that this thing takes to keep the caffeine fix going. Dropping my overall review from 3 stars to 2 stars because of never ending and increasing maintenance/cleaning overhead. I've had the brew group get stuck in the unit twice in this past month. Fixing required another YouTube video search (search for "stuck brew group") and some significant disassembly to not force break removing the brew group from that stuck position. Its not terribly difficult to do once you learn this latest trick and nothing was broke or broken in the fixing process but its a pain, that simple. Shouldn't have to put this much effort into getting a cup of coffee every day. In good conscience, I can no longer recommend this unit from an overall operational standpoint. It's good coffee that hasn't changed - but the cost in labor is getting to be really irritating. Worst of all I have to admit that my wife's assessment of this expensive purchase is turning out to be correct, "its a bit of a lemon". So swallowing a bit of crow along with my joe....not fun, and it was almost $800 bucks+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++This is my first “fully automatic*” coffee machine, all of my other coffee making methods previous to this machine consisted of the following: Stove top and electric peculators, instant coffee, coffee presses, drip coffee makers (very low end to very high end in price), poured over coffee making processes. I have many great memories of really good cups of coffee from all of these methods, but in terms of day in and day out coffee making and consistently getting a really good cup of coffee, I really like this Latte Go machine. The other methods were much more touch and go and fleeting in those really good cups of coffee, this machine is pretty much all of the time.So my grade of this coffee maker in terms of consistently producing a very good cup of coffee is like 4 out 5 stars - in my stage of present coffee snobbery. I think my wife would agree with this grade which regards the aspect of “taste” in this review. I am sure there are better coffee makers out there, like anything there always is, but I’m sure pricing on those machines which might yield those 5 stars is completely outrageous - the cost of this machine was close enough to that for me. I’m very happy with the purchase from this point of view, it makes really good coffee in my opinion.What most of this review will be about though, is where I’m not quite so happy with this machine, with that being its daily maintenance. This is what drives my final product grade down from a 4 to a 3. For this machine to be “fully automatic” it does require a considerable amount of daily “manual” intervention, i.e. cleaning, so one could really argue the fully automatic selling feature of this machine. When it works, it works great, when it doesn’t it just needs cleaning - its just really that simple with this machine. This aspect of this specific machine is where I think many people may find this purchase potentially off putting. If you don’t have an issue with being hands on with this machine from a daily cleaning perspective to get that great cup of coffee, then you will be okay. If you can’t or don’t have the desire for that sort of commitment and willingness to experience this “pain in the butt” factor, then I don’t think then that this machine would be for you. This isn’t your drip coffee maker which your probably used to. My experience with this machine is that it absolutely needs almost daily fussing with in the cleaning department for it to work properly. I am typically willing to make that expenditure in time and effort to achieve that great cup of coffee from this machine. I will be absolutely honest here though, there have been mornings where I have really wanted to punt this machine to the curb. Its at times very frustrating, especially in the early morning when all you want is that first cup of wonderful coffee to drink and to fully wake up, only to find that this machine is having another one of its hiccups…I will bring something up at this point which may be a large influencing factor with my direct experiences with this machine. We make and drink a lot of coffee every day in our house. I drink the non-milk based drinks from this machine, the Americano’s and the regular coffees. My wife drinks the frothed drinks from this machine, the Lattes mostly and sometimes the Cappuccino's. I probably use the machine a minimum of 7 times a day for my drinks, all of which are doubles, and my wife a minimum of 5 drinks a day. These are minimums, so we use our machine a great deal each day. This may greatly influence the degree of issues and problems we experience and which then revolve around the cleaning aspect of this machine, so please keep this in mind as you read.Cleaning, my reality with the machine. There are basically 2 issues I which I experience with this machine.1) More water going into the drip tray vs the actual coffee drink, than what is desired and normal. This is by far the worst issue with this machine.2) Milk frothing of the machine not working properly.These 2 items above constitute 99.9% of my issues with this machine. Item #1 is fixed by cleaning. Item #2 is fixed by cleaning/using different milk/and messing with the heat settings of the machine.Fixing Issue #1. More water going into drip tray vs the coffee drink than what is desired and normal.Remove the brew group and give it a thorough rinse out in the sink. Wipe out where the brew group sits within the machine with paper toweling to get rid of any grounds and general gunk buildup. My tip here is to use a flashlight (I use a very nerdy led headlamp but excellent for this purpose) and to peer into the cavity where the brew group sits and look for gunk that way. You will be amazed and possibly grossed out by how much gunk collects within that cavity in all of the nooks and crannies. Its black plastic (by design I’m guessing) and very dark in there, so without the light your going to overlook a bunch of gunk. So use the light and give it a good cleaning. It will help resolve issues and improve coffee taste. When I rinse the brew group, I fill the sink with hot soapy water and let the brew group soak in it for a while. After that sitting period , I then agitate the brew group in the water by hand. I like this because it does a general deep cleaning of the brew group and does a good job of removing oils. I have found that just performing general under the faucet rinse outs to be less effective. One mistake I was consistently making, which may have aggravated some of my issues with this machine, is over lubricating it. I was touching up the lubrication of the brew group almost every time I rinsed the brew group out. Your only supposed to do the greasing about every 500 cups, in general. That period of times seems a bit long to me, so I would just say lubricate it when you think it really needs it - bad squeaking noises, the brew group visibly moving a bit hard as you manually exercise it through its full range of motion when you have it removed from the unit for its rinse out, etc. The point is that I was overdoing it. It doesn’t need to be anywhere near the frequency I was performing it at. Possibly because I was over greasing, I at one point had to completely dissemble the brew group because it had reached a point where it was just so gunked up by grease, fine grounds and the combined mixture produced by those two items, where the unit was still moving hard even though I had just performed my deep rinse process on it. Grease and finely ground coffee dust creates a thick sludgy gunky mess in the brew group. No matter how often I rinsed the brew unit out, I was just getting tons of water in the drip tray vs the actual drink. So I found some videos on YouTube which demonstrated a complete disassembly of the brew group unit, just search brew group disassembly for those videos. I disassembled my unit, with the confidence gained from watching those videos, and then gave my brew group a super thorough clean out with a stiff nylon dish brush and a long soaking in a sink filled with hot water and Dawn dish-washing soap. I then re-assembled it after lightly re-greasing the moving parts again. This resolved the issue of over greasing and just having that constant amount of water bypassing the drinks and going into the drip tray. I had to do this once in my 12 months of use about 7 months into my ownership, again most likely self induced rather than a defect in the unit. A bit scary to do as a new replacement brew group is like $80 after just having plunked down $700-$800 for this purchase of this coffee maker in the first place, but totally doable after watching those disassembly several videos from several sources as reference. You will need a Torxs #10 bit, and a small flat bladed screwdriver to act as as pry bar, and a good shot of whiskey for resolve :). Don’t use power tools. The brew group screws, those screw directly into soft plastic and you will strip them out if you don’t tighten the screws by hand and use a gun or something like that. After having done it once, I would call this process no big deal, just time consuming. I could see myself having to perform this process again even despite cutting back o my re-greasing of the brew group. I am hi-lighting this mistake on my part to bring attention to the fact that you can take apart the brew group and recondition it if the need arises. You don’t need to spend $80.Another thing which I just “very recently” ran across in my almost daily battle of too much water into the drip tray is something you want to pay attention to as it greatly reduces the severity and frequency of that irritating issue. If you look at my second attached photo you will see a picture of the water outlet valve which sits inside the cavity where the brew group slides into. Those 2 red O-rings on that water outlet valve, keep a **light** film of grease on those rings (all red O-rings which you see in the unit for that matter). Greasing those O-rings creates a much stronger and easier seal in my unit, which does not dry out over night. Hence I have much less occurrence of water bypassing the drink and ending up in the drip tray. I think this is my top tip to remember! Perform the light greasing of those rings with your finger tip is my suggestion.This leads me to resolving issue number #2. Issues with milk frothing. You will know when you have this problem when you see large air bubbles in your milk froth instead of tiny little ones. The large air bubbles result in less loft and volume of the milk froth and result in flat tasting drinks. It will be very apparent when you experience this issue. The vast majority of the time the solution to this issue is thecleanliness of the Latte-go cup. There is a milk channel in this cup located in the area of the cup where it hooks into the machine where steam comes out and where it ends, where the frothed milk eventually comes out of the cup when you use it. This channel will get clogged with dried up milk enzymes. This occurs when you let milk sit in the Latte-go cup or store milk in the Latte-go cup in the fridge and don’t empty it out and rinse it out quickly under the sink after each use. To fix it, same as the brew group. Fill the sink with hot soapy water and let the cup soak. Agitate the cup by hand in the water after it has soaked and things have softened up. If that doesn’t correct the issue, I resort to making a fake Latte in the machine. Use water in the Latte-go cup instead of milk. Set the machine to use coffee grounds instead of beans, and don’t put any ground coffee into the ground coffee receptacle. Your fooling the machine to make a Latte without any milk or coffee. You just want the water and steam to pass through the Latte-go cup to dislodge those dried up milk enzymes. It this method doesn’t work, I have also made a water and Rinza cleaning agent mixture in the Latte-go cup, again replacing milk in the cup with this mixture, and again no coffee grounds. Run this cleaning agent through a fake Latte process and that should clean out the channel. So same as previous method but also using Rinza cleaning agent along with the water. Rinza is especially made to clean milk enzymes in coffee making equipment, buy it on Amazon.If cleaning the Latte-go cup does not correct you milk froth issues, look to your milk. Our experience with producing milk froth in this machine has always been with whole milk only, we have not tried or used other milks, so I can only say that I have experienced this issue with whole milk, but I’m sure it will apply to other milks perhaps at other degrees. If you are getting large air bubbles in your milk froth and the Latte-go cup channel is clean, then its your milk. BUY NEW MILK. This is the shortcut to prevent just ripping your hair out. Just BUY NEW MILK. I have had 2 instances so far where my frothing issues have been directly caused by milk which I believe was not fresh enough or had some other defect which I could not analyze. Just switching to new milk from another source corrected the issue immediately.I also had one occurrence in the past where I had frothing issues. Cleaning the Latte-go cup did not solve it. I think I tried replacing the milk in the Latte-go cup several times but it may have been from the same carton of milk, I am no longer sure. In that one instance of time, I reduced the coffee maker brewing temperature from its hottest 3 dot setting to its medium 2 dot setting (read the manual), and in that case it corrected the milk frothing issue immediately as well. In hindsight, I think that was most likely also caused by the milk and not the heat setting of the unit overall. Just throwing this out there as something which I did run across, but while the heat setting corrected the issue, I think now looking back with further experience, that the issue was really just the milk. I think reducing the temperature just sort of put a chemical reaction sort of band aid on some milk which just possibly wasn’t fresh enough - that’s my guess.Just very recently had another frothing issue, large air bubbles. We had bought 2 half gallon cartons of whole organic milk with exact same expiration date at exact same time at exact same store, Aldies, which is where we buy 90% of our milk - all of the time. For whatever reason, the one half gallon was causing us frothing issues with large air bubbles. Switching to the second half gallon immediately cleared up the issue. Visually, I could see no difference between the 2 milks. So good example of just trying different milk instead of going to other cleaning extremes to try to correct the frothing issue.Descaling the coffee maker. I don’t know if I am correct here and/or potentially harming my machine or not but here goes. About once a month, I deep clean my entire machine using Rinza agent and water instead of buying a Philips specific descaling solution. I have done this for 11 months now. I own the Rinza cleaning agent, I don’t own the Philips descaling solution, so I am making use of what I have which is cheaper and on hand. I remove the water filter from the water tank. I fill the tank with a solution made up of 3 ounces of Rinza agent to remaining parts of cold water. The tank is filled with this solution. I then make several styles of drink using the machine and this solution without its water filter. I select ground coffee and like with the Latte-go cleaning process, I simply neglect to put ground coffee into the unit tricking the coffee maker to make a drink without actually using coffee. I make drinks using this method until all of the solution is used up. Both frothy and non-frothy drinks. Then I rinse out the water container in the unit and just refill it with 100% water as usual, still with no filter in place. And I run that through the coffee maker, again making a wide variety of drinks minus the coffee. This rinses all traces of the Rinza solution out of the machine. I then replace the water filter back into the tank and I’m back in normal coffee making business. So far this has worked very well for me, no issues. Try this or not for yourself, just putting it out.Final words of advice. Search you-tube for videos relating to brew group cleaning and maintenance. Much better and informative then the official Philips product videos.