Another blog about a quick repair I did today. I drink coffee, lots of it. As part of my coffee routine I have a Nespresso coffee machine and frother for the milk. Now the frother is OK, nothing special but warms the milk up and makes it a little more like a coffee shop. I’m not a massive fan as it teads to burn the milk a little and cleaning is a bit of a pain.
Anyway this afternoon it is dead. Press the start button and nothing happens. No nothing. No flash just dead. So dead that I thought at first it was the fuse in the plug. Checked that and nothing wrong. Checked the base station with meter and the connector was live (careful, 240v here, you don’t want to touch that!) So definately a problem with the device itself.
Reading around the web a bit I thought the most likely problem was a thermal cutout fuse. So multimeter in hand I decided to take the device to bits. Found this video describing how to get into the device itself. Two screws and then just pull / twist apart, mine wasn’t that hard to pull apart. No screwdrivers or other leverage required. Note a piece of clear plastic (where switch is guided into place) fell out when I removed the slieve. This just clips back onto the board. Make sure you pop out the soft switch cover on the case before putting back together. Watch video.
So picture below before I started playing. Checked the resistance along the read wire containing the fuse. It wasn’t quite open circuit but many mega ohms, more than it should be.
So slide the heat shrink back and cut the offending compondent out. At this point I didn’t have a suitable replacement so I thought I would just solder the wires back together and see if it at least works. So thats what I did. Soldered together and re-assembled.
Success. Lights up and attempts to heat and froth. Now it may have been the milk but it seemed to heat the milk more and not froth anywhere near as well as before. Odd. Now clearly the heat cut out fuse is a safety feature to stop it bursting into flames so I would recommend leaving it like this. Now I think what caused my problem was my partner pooring boiling water into the frother to try and soak the burnt milk off. I think boiling water and the age of the device was sufficent to trip the device into failure.
Now I ordered a replacement thermal fuse from ebay (there are a number of vendors selling them) and fitted. It now froths milk as before, so I suspect there is a small resistance in the device (i should have checked before I fitted it!) which will make it heat more slowly therefore getting more whisking. So I would definately recommended fitting a new thermal fuse, if only for the better quality frothing. Safety to is important, just buy and fit the fuse.
Extra note you can remove the circuit board from the two retaining clamps by pusing down slightly and twisting out. Contacts onto the heating element are spring loaded. Makes putting the fuse back in the little clip much much easier.