After a year of laziness, I finally have my B II working again. After 15 years and only having to replace the pump and OPV, I was limping along with a few issues for a while. The main issue I had was that the steam boiler refill would stop working once the machine came up to temperature. Worked fine at startup and I would do some testing while the brew boiler was coming up to temperature and it would continue to work and even sometimes for a while after it reached temperature. I opened up the machine to start doing some testing and noticed a small leak from the pressurestat so that was the first thing I took care of. After testing everything, I took the control board out of the housing and noticed some blackening around the relay. Replaced it and everything back to normal on that side.
Next issue was a familiar one, pressure fluctuation during extraction after the machine had been on for a while. First couple of shots would usually be OK though. Lived with it like this for another year and it continued to get worse to the point where I couldn't pull a shot without pressure loss. Replaced the pump and dialed in the OPV and seems to be back to normal. Last issue and the one I am looking for a little guidance on was the AKO controller showing impossible temperature fluctuation after the machine had been on for a while. The read out would go from 95 to 70, fluctuate widely and then back to 95. Temperature seemed to actually be OK and shots were fine. It had been recommended by WLL that I pull the temperature probe and see if it was covered in scale. When I finally got it out there were two tiny spots (about 2mm diameter). I cleaned them off and reinstalled the probe with Teflon valve packing and then got an E1 error immediately. I pulled the probe back out and couldn't see a problem but figured I broke it so I started pulling on the wire and it came out of the probe with bare twisted wires. The original wire must have been pushed down in there because at least an inch came out when I pulled it. I wrapped some tape around it temporarily and put it back in and everything started working again, I had it on for 6 hours with no more fluctuation than a drop to 94 degrees. For now I have applied some RTV 6500 high temperature silicone to keep the wire in place and prevent another short. I am going to put it back in tomorrow once the silicone has fully cured. WLL does not have a replacement, the one they directed me to was for the PID. Not sure I want to do that project to upgrade to PID though, I'd rather buy a new machine honestly. From what I can tell the part I need is the AKO 14901 thermocouple. Seems to be very difficult to find because of the age but I have found a couple of places. Would I just need to remove the previous sensor and then get the new one down in the hole and secured somehow? I saw a thread on home-barista.com but it's not exactly clear as to how to secure the new thermocouple in the probe. Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can give. Rob -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Brewtus" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/brewtus. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/brewtus/579560d2-183e-42a1-870a-530c40f6f3d6%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
