QUESTION:

Good Evening Shane:

My company has started with a new coffee brewing company and they have brought in your machine Fetco cbs-52h.  We have been having some issues with it and the technician takes so long to come that by the time he shows up the problem is temporary corrects itself.

The problem:

The ready light takes too long to come back on.  It makes about two MAYBE three pots of coffee and then takes forever to refill again.  I can’t even fill 5 - 20oz tea cups of water without the ready light going off. I have looked up the manual and it states it may be lime build up or the thermostat is bad. However, it is about 200 degrees when the water is coming out and I can hear a clicking which I am assuming is heater going on and off.

Can you help? My service department is useless because by the time they show up my store is no longer busy and they can no longer witness this event.

Please help.

Thank you.

Latoya

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ANSWER:

It sounds to me like one of the heating elements is not drawing full amps so therefore you are slow heating.

If it is what I suspect, it should be very easy to find even when the brewer is not presenting the problem.

First thing is that the tech that comes out to look at the brewer needs to have an Amp Clamp because we need to look at the amperage draw on each heater.

With amp clamp in hand and the top of the brewer removed, the tech needs to draw water out of the brewer until the thermostat call for heat. If this is a digital thermostat this will be indicated by a yellow LED illuminating. While in the heat mode the tech should clamp onto one wire going to each heater. He will want to see about 10-11 amps per heating element.

If one is significantly lower than this then there could be several causes.

1. Bad heating element (This would show amp draw but not much)
2. Bad single shot t-stat (This would show 0 amp draw)
3. Bad solid state relay (This would show 0 am draw)
4. Rare but possible is the breaker is only partially tripped.

Knowing this information will lead the tech in the correct direction.

I hope this proves helpful. Please up date as to your findings.

Shane Blais
Director of Technical Services and Corporate Training