Hello everyone! I’m hoping someone with a bit more PID troubleshooting experience can give me some insight in to a problem I’m having.
At the end of last November, the pressure-stat on my 2010 Brewtus III had gone out of adjustment after 6 years of daily service. The steam boiler would occasionally (every day or two) overheat to 1.7 bar causing the overpressure valve to vent for a few moments before finally switching off. Unfortunately, I ignored this for a few days due to a busy schedule and Thanksgiving guests (not wanting to tear the machine apart in the middle of the holiday) until I woke up the Monday after Thanksgiving to a blown GFCI circuit in the kitchen. Since the machine is on a timer to pre-heat early each morning, I strongly suspected the GFCI must have tripped due to condensation inside of the housing from repeated and / or an extended overpressure venting before I woke up (there was water under the machine)… ergo, time to stop procrastinating! So I pulled the steel cover before resetting the GFCI, reviewed the process for adjusting the pressure-stat on youTube, powered on the machine AND… was greeted by a flashing 1.04 firmware number that didn’t transition over to the the normal temperature readout. Joy. Symptom wise, when I looked closely at the screen, the PID seemed to loose power repeatedly every 3 to 4 seconds and experience a very brief full screen “Flash” at the moment I’d normally expect it to transition to the temperature readout - but the machine also appeared to be pre-heating as normal with the steam boiler light on. And being a born button pusher I proceeded to do several useless things in rapid sequence. I flipped the front toggle switch on and off a few times quickly, no dice. Turned the machine off for 1 minute then turned back on, no dice. Randomly pushed the adjustment arrows on the PID, nope… Time to call WLL. While I went to get my phone I left the machine on for maybe 5 minutes while I was in the other room, and lo and behold when I walked back into the kitchen the temperature screen was up! It had reverted to Celsius from Fahrenheit (which was a little worrying) but was heating as expected and after warming up worked just fine. In my mind I’d dodged a bullet, so I adjusted the pressure-stat, put the machine back together, reselected Fahrenheit, and forgot about the incident until a week later - when the PID had reset to Celsius again mysteriously overnight. Does anyone have an idea of what may be going on here? In my mind there is some sort of power issue within the PID at start up that is causing it to repeatedly cycle and default back to it’s factory presets (e.g. the return to Celsius and the loss of my custom brew temp as well). The PID goes through the “Flashing” phase I describe above nearly every time the machine turns on, and the temperature readout also seems to bounce around quite a bit at low temps (e.g. showing 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,23, 22, 21 in rapid succession) whereas it used to increase in a smooth linear manner only. But that aside, its pulling shots just fine. Has anyone else ever encountered this before? Any idea of what might be the cause? Here's a link to a quick video clip of what it's doing: Brewtus III "PID" Problem <https://youtu.be/yrbIDMsmuaA> All feedback is welcome, and thanks in advance! Best, Mike -- 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 brewtus+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to brewtus@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/brewtus. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
