Green Coffee Buying Club
Coffee Discussion boards => Hardware & Equipment => Topic started by: headchange4u on August 07, 2008, 06:27:25 PM
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Well I am thoroughly pissed off.
I went to roast a batch of beans tonight and my iRoast2 and my iRoast gave a strained hum but the blower never started up. I unplugged the unit a couple of times and got the same symptoms. After about 3 attempts I got no sound from the unit at all. Dead. I can feel the heating element coming on through the top but the blower motor is not working.
I took the unit apart but didn't really see anything obviously wrong. I also didn't notice a fuse or anything. A Google search didn't turn up much.
I bought the unit used and the person that I bought it from said they probably didn't use but 20 or 30 times, and I have done about 17 roasts since I picked it up.
Anyone have any ideas?
EDIT:
Once I put the unit back together it fired up and worked fine...for now. I am still wary that it may quit at any time.
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I have personally never used this roaster. Tom Owen from Sweet Maria says that it is his favorite roaster. A quick look at Amazon show that out of 36 reviews ... 26 people have rated it a 4 or a 5 out of 5. Speaks fairly positive of the roaster. Maybe the person whom you bought it from used it a bit more than he claims to have used it. I have a FR 8+ and have been roasting with it for 1 and 2/3 years with not problem. I do expect it to die on me at one point ... I have done well over 200 roasts with it. These do not last forever.
:)
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I also found it odd that there was almost no info on the roaster malfunctioning with my Google search. Maybe my problem was a fluke or maybe something was binding the motor. When I took it apart the bottom of the motor had a slot for a flat head screw driver that allowed you to manually turn the shaft for the blower fan. I spun it few few times. There was some resistance, which may be normal, but it didn't feel like it was binding.
After reassembling the unit, I went through a whole roast cycle with no problems at all and the beans seem to agitate just as well as every other time I have used it. I did notice a slight squeal as the motor spun down when the cooling cycle ended.