Source? I'm from Italy, where everybody's using them, but never heard of a single one exploding. Maybe you can find an isolated case, but I'm confident it's extremely rare. There's a safety valve to release pressure after all, and if you use the Moka correctly the valve never has to engage.
I’m in the Dominican Republic, and moka pots are 99 percent of the market here as well. Everyone warns me about moka pots exploding, but I’ve never met anyone (15 years here now) that knows of one first hand that actually exploded.
But everyone is terrified of mokasplosion.
I’ll admit, the prospect of a pressurized vessel of boiling water is a potent reminder for precautionary thinking.
Minor nitpick here, but it's a fact I found interesting when I heard about it. The water inside a Moka doesn't boil, you can indeed observe that the water coming out from the top isn't boiling. What happens is that the air that is left inside the bottom chamber expands due to the heat, pushing the water upwards.
The custom where I am at is to load the moka pot with a grind and quantity that produces a significant barrier to the flow of water.
The alert that the brew is finished is the sound of the boiling hot water and steam spraying the coffee through the standpipe into the upper chamber, and it is absolutely under steam pressure, I’d say around 5 to 10 psi.
When the liquid water is low enough that it doesn’t get picked up by the lower tube, you get a significant outflow of pure steam hissing through the standpipe nozzle, and then it’s quiet, as the bottom chamber is now completely dry, as are the grounds when you dump them out.
It could be that if you use a coarser grind or less coffee than is customary here, flow restriction does not occur, and the pressure of the heated air and water vapor is enough to push out all of the water through the coffee without reaching 100c (should only take about 1/6 psi for a flow overcoming gravity to that height) but if you used that method here your coffee would fall under heavy criticism.
The violence with which the flow jets into the upper chamber and the volume and aroma of the steam serves somewhat as a social signal as to the “quality” of the coffee, so there is a strong incentive to heavily load the pots here.
Legends of exploding pots are common, as is precautionary disposal of pots whose threads have become excessively worn.
But I still have no first hand knowledge of anyone witnessing an explosion or even an over pressure venting event (there is a small pressure relief valve on the side of the vessel)…. So I suspect that the risk is not that high.
Interesting, the different way we use mochas can explain why you have stories about explosions: our way is definitely putting less stress on mochas, which end up lasting for decades without the need to be replaced. We use coffee that is specifically ground for mochas, and we fill the chamber with water up until just below the valve (or, at the very limit, the water reaches half the valve). You still hear a sound when the coffee is ready, but it is caused by little sprays of coffee mixed with hot air, not steam.
Well my wife had one and it exploded (and it was Italian, Bialetti I think), we have several friends with explosions etc. It's of course possible that Italians use it properly and we don't, but I'm not an expert in this topic, so I just stay away from them.
This is unexpected to me: I would have assumed that, even if you did something wrong, the valve would have prevented an explosion. I can understand a single valve going bad, but if this happened to many of your friends there might be something going on there.
