Best part of today was clearing off Hawaii our island in the kitchen. So much stuff crowding out all it's space that I really had to cut and prep dinner on a small cutting board on the mainland...as we call the rest of the kitchen counter space. Within minutes of getting up I found myself facing a failed coffee machine...our almost trusty SAECO espresso machine was inert when pressed into morning coffee service. WTF?! No red light indicators, just power on,light and no coffee machine noise when the coffee machine button is pushed. Then I noticed that along side the right hand side of the machine was a pile of coffee grounds, Hmmmm and a big "oh shit'! This led to opening the right hinged panel and discovering a heap of coffee grounds around the mechanism. Yea gads, what a mess! This has happened before on this machine and others...what happens is not clear but the mess it leaves behind certainly is! I have removed the brew unit before on all of these espresso machnies we have had. It's the easiest on this particular SAECO one. Upon removing the unit I discovered that it was not in the same position that I have seen on the unit when I did this before. A sping-like part was fully exposed and after some fooling around with the mechanism discovered that it was apparently out of sync with the way it normally was when powered up in previous disassembles.
I spent the next 1/2 hour cleaning up the grounds from all the places it's not supposed to be. Then I washed the brew unit and wiped up the grounds from where the brew unit is placed in the machine. That done I reinstalled the brew unit, closed the side panel and attempted to place the grounds container back into the machine, no luck! So I pulled the contained back out and examined the space it fit into. It looked fine, si I figured that the brew unit was not installed properly as it was the only other item I had removed from the machine. I then discovered how the mechanism worked and saw that for it to be out of position it would need rotation of the machines drive motor...that was not going to happen so I rotated the brew unit's mechanism until I could get a click upon inserting the brewq unit back inside the machine. Then with that done I used a knife to hold the switch on the grounds container closed...then I closed the side panel and the machine came alive! Wow! I won't be tricked like this again, I'll clean out the machine once a week, not once a month or more and maybe forestall this kind of failure.
I spent the next 1/2 hour cleaning up the grounds from all the places it's not supposed to be. Then I washed the brew unit and wiped up the grounds from where the brew unit is placed in the machine. That done I reinstalled the brew unit, closed the side panel and attempted to place the grounds container back into the machine, no luck! So I pulled the contained back out and examined the space it fit into. It looked fine, si I figured that the brew unit was not installed properly as it was the only other item I had removed from the machine. I then discovered how the mechanism worked and saw that for it to be out of position it would need rotation of the machines drive motor...that was not going to happen so I rotated the brew unit's mechanism until I could get a click upon inserting the brewq unit back inside the machine. Then with that done I used a knife to hold the switch on the grounds container closed...then I closed the side panel and the machine came alive! Wow! I won't be tricked like this again, I'll clean out the machine once a week, not once a month or more and maybe forestall this kind of failure.
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