Pulled a ~ 600 € DeLonghi coffee maker out of the dumpster and invested about 50 € in spare parts (water tank, grounds container, and a new magnet valve). Seems like I have a new coffee machine now
Pulled a ~ 600 € DeLonghi coffee maker out of the dumpster and invested about 50 € in spare parts (water tank, grounds container, and a new magnet valve). Seems like I have a new coffee machine now 😁☕
(It would have gone even faster and without a puddle on the kitchen counter if I had put in the gaskets from the start. 🤦 Ah well.)
It grinds the whole beans and typically they also have a doser (measures the weight or quantity of the ground up coffee beans), then it tamps the grounds, brews the coffee (which is some at a specific temperature and pressure), then ejects the used up coffee puck in a bin in the bottom of the machine.
The mechanism for the automatic tamping, brewing (with pressure valve) and ejection is one very complicated piece as well as the controls for the motor that operates it. Then there's the temperature and pressure controls for both the brewing of the coffee and the milk frother the machine likely has.
Edit: Video with partial teardown and which shows how the internals operate
@workerONE Officially, I'm a computer scientist 😉 But over the years, I've fiddled around with enough electronics and mechanical engineering as well that I'm overall pretty good at fixing stuff 🤷
@agent_flounder Yes, big kudos to DeLonghi as well. They could just have glued everything together into one big epoxy block, but no, they chose to make it actually repairable (and even let you buy replacement parts). 👌
I think they make too much money repairing complex coffee machines to make it difficult
Also unlike phones they don't need to make them small as possible and able to survive being carried all day, so don't have those reasons for making things tight and sealed
@gronjo45 I'd say roughly an hour to take the cover off and find the broken valve, one week waiting for the replacement to ship, and half an hour to put it back in 😉
It's amazing what a little curiosity can do. Most would consider the machine dead. A friend also had a similar coffee maker that stopped working and just decided to pop the cover off to see if there was anything obvious. A quick replacement of a deteriorated hose and they were back up and running when it otherwise would've ended up in the landfill.