Hi All, About 3 weeks ago my 8 year old brewtus 2 stopped heating up. Pid showed room temp. Checked the usual: no steam leaking from reverse pressure relief valve, the overtemp switches on top of boilers were untripped and had continuity. I couldn't see anything wrong. Called WLL, they said it could be a heating element and told me how to diagnose. Sure enough the brew boiler heating element had 200ohms of resistance, shows continuity with multitester. The steam boiler heating element had many thousands/no continuity. Called back to order heating element. After taking my order tech helpfully suggested I could swich the bottom two wires on the pstat which causes heating priority to go to brew boiler (brew boiler previously didn't get hot because prioritized steam boiler never warmed.) This would keep me in the coffee until I could replace the steam boiler's heating element. Wow. Super helpful tech. Quick with answers and nice. Over the years I've had a fair bit of experience with the brewtus' insides: - Many rebuilds of reverse pressure relief valve (high temp o-ring replaced every two years) - On off switch (brittle and broke) - Original controller died replaced with pid/new temp sensor - PStat (leaked steam, then broke) - Both overtemp sensors (plastic rotted) - Replaced OPV (mine was old bad original one and couldn't adjust brew pressure to be low enough, got the nice new one with brass screw, highly recommended) Overall I gotta say this wasn't the hardest job. Most involved was putting in the pid kit. Total time was maybe 4 hours, not including the drive to service station, but including all the extra futzing like building new insulation. I'm not going to walk through the whole thing but offer some suggestions: 1) Don't even try to get the heating element out with your puny tools. Forget the 4 foot breaker bar. I have a huge vice and a big wrench and I couldn't make it budge. Finally I went to a local service station and borrowed their air gun with correct socket. Clamp boiler in a vice and the element comes out in about 10 seconds with no hassle or damage. Unbelievable how effective the air gun's rattle action is. 2) If your machine is old like mine each fittng will be stuck and come loose with a clank or creak. Be sure and have a variety of open wrenches available. You'll use at least 5 different sizes. Hopefully you have some with small heads because some fittings are are difficult to reach. Be SURE to support whatever the fitting is screwed into with another wrench. Come on, invest in some good tools. Get a FULL set of high quality open ended wrenches, a good phillips, some hex sockets and a socket wrench. With good tools this job is make much easier. Keep the adjustable wrenches away from the brass, too easy to damage the fittings (assuming you can even reach). Some of the craftsman are nice. 3) Have a big roll of teflon tape handy for reassembly. There's lots of fittings to wrap when you reassemble. Stuff works great to seal and aids disassembly. Everything I've previously reassembled with teflon comes straight out, so do it for next time. 4) The steam boiler is hard to remove. Not sure the right way but I took out the brew boiler so that I had room to unwind the steam boiler from a pipe that goes in its base. 5) The steam boiler has many fittings and two are for its heat exchanger. My heat exchanger was full of scale. Tons of it. Rest of machine was very clean. Took 20/30 minutes to clean all that scale out. I used a screw driver to break up the pieces then filled the boiler and shook it to pour out the flakes. Got it all out. 6) When washing the steam boiler the thin fiberglass insulation all broken up and washed away. Had to make a new blanky for the steam boiler. I used some wool felt I had around. We'll see how that lasts. Machine is certainly quieter now. 7) The busted element looked fine. Nothing wrong except no continuity so broken inside somehow. 8) Machine will brew with no heat in steam boiler, but has trouble holding temp for a shot. Takes a while to heatup. Not good. Very happy to have steam boiler back to provide hot refill to brew boiler. 9) Wrap all the threads on the boiler with teflon before you put the boilers back into the machine. 10) Almost all my plastic spade connector covers are yellow and super brittle. They shattered on touch. I built new covers using outdoor rated heat shrink electrical tubing. Local electronic store sells it for $3 for 4 feet. The wires to the steam boiler's heating elemet also looked like they'd seen heat and water. I covered them with heat shrink too. 11) When restarting machine remember to refill both boilers by running pump. Do it before machine has a chance to get hot. Keep water handy to refill water tank while this is happening.Fortunately my tubing and pump still had prime so worked great. Took a few minutes before water came out of brew head. Started machine up, noticed it takes longer to heat up when steam boiler has priority. Worked first time, pulled a shot of vivace and all was well again. Oh, and machine seems lots quieter with the large felt blanket on the steam boiler. Cheers, Eric
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