Coffee Machine: Dead
I don’t appear to have written down when we got it, but I’m fairly sure Grog talked me into taking his broken Saeco Intelia Evo when I picked up the UPS from him, which would put it just under three years ago. I’m not sure how long after that it was that I got it working… there’s a resistor ladder on the board which is used to calculate the current draw of the grinder, and it uses that for calculating the dose of coffee beans - one of those resistors had popped, I soldered another on top of it and we were using it since.
We’ve had a couple spots of trouble with it, it had a fairly minor leak somewhere with the hot water, and I didn’t feel like messing with potentially scalding water so I just pretended I didn’t see it. That ended up making the microswitch that tells if the side door is open stop working, so I just bridged it so that it thought it was always closed (fuck yeah, safety!). We then noticed a few months back that there was a bit of steam building up under the bean hopper, so Sabriena started looking at replacements… but true to form, we never pulled the trigger.
Today, Sabriena noticed that it was complaining there was no water in it, when it should have ordinarily flushed itself out and shut off. Popped it apart, and after a bit of poking around I figured out that the water level sensor’s corroded. Pulled it out, cleaned it up with some flux and reflowing the dodgy looking joints, and I got it working long enough to do one power-on line rinse and that’s it. It’s dead, Jim.
So I took it apart and took the opportunity to photograph the super-dodgy repair job I originally did - I wish I could tell you I went back and fixed this. I wish I could, but I can’t. I left it like that. I figured it would break again and I would have ordered the SMT resistor for it, but I didn’t, and it didn’t break in that way, it just kept chugging along.
Anyway, Greg appears to have bought the thing in December, 2015, and it looks like he replaced it in November, 2019. It sat, broken in his shed for two years before I picked it up, and we’ve had it for nearly 3, so I think it’s done a fairly good innings?
fwagglePublished:
Modified:
Filed under:
Location:
Horsham, VIC, AustraliaNavigation: Older Entry Newer Entry