QUESTION:

Greetings,

I have a CBS-2052 brewer that’s acting up.  I reset it to factory defaults and then adjusted the volume on Batches 1 and 4 to 1.7 gallons and Batches 3 and 6 to 1.2 gallons.  The left side is fine but the right side is brewing about half the amount that’s programmed.  Both sides are programmed exactly the same.

Any suggestions?  I bought this business about 7 months ago and this is the first time I’ve gone through the programming.  It’s pretty straightforward but with the two sides so different, I’m wondering what’s up.

Thanks!
 
Kirk

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ANSWER:

Kirk,

First let me say congratulations on your new business. I hope all is going well. Second I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulties. The problem you described could be very simple to moderately difficult to fix.

I am not sure how old your CBS-2052 is, but I am guessing your brewer has a metal spray head or spray plate as we call it. This allows that water to shower over the grounds evenly. It also acts as a flow disc . Each hole in the spray plate is made to an exact diameter so that the water flows through the plate at certain rate. Now, while this works great for the purposes of extracting coffee, it unfortunately also works great as a scale collector.

Because the total volume produced by the brewer relies on all the holes allowing a predetermined amount of water to flow through, if one or all of them develop a build up of scale on them, then this predetermined amount of water is reduced. More often then not all the holes equally collect scale and become equally restricted. I said all of this to point out the importance of keeping these holes clean.

The tricky part is frequently the holes look clean when in fact they are not so as a general rule of thumb we recommend cleaning the spray plates daily (usually at beginning of day so spray plate is cold) regardless of whether the spray plate holes look like they need it or not.

To clean the holes you have to remove the spray plates from the brewer. Pease be careful because if you just brewed the spray plate will be very hot and it retains about 5-7oz of water behind it. We recommend using, believe it or not, a clean tooth pick running it around inside the hole making sure all the scale is removed. Once you start to clean you will see the scale flake away or sometimes it just turns to powder.

Once you have done this I would recommend setting the brewer back to defaults and running a couple of batches of just water if you don’t you will probably over pot and dump water all over the counter.

Now of course this was assuming you have the metal spray plates. If this is not the case you then would have our Cascading Spray Dome (CSD). The CSD is less susceptible to scale build up, but it never hurts to take these down and using a medium to soft bristled brush clean under warm water.

If this is not the culprit, then you probably have a restriction in the water lines going from the water tank to the dispense valves. This is a bit trickery to take care of so try the cleaning first if you need instruction on finding your water line restriction let me know and I will provide you step by step instructions for that.

I hope this information proves helpful please let me know what you find either way.  Or if you need further help please let me know.

Shane Blais
Director of Technical Services
and Corporate Training