brew boiler not heating on v2 and no alarms

[dansf]

I woke yesterday to find my Vivaldi II cold. The machine was operating normally when I went to bed, and I left the brew boiler on (turned off steam) as usual. I operate on economy mode. When I woke up there were no alarms, blocking or otherwise, just the ECON and ON/STBY steady on and the BOILER and 93c lights blinking expectantly as if coming to temperature. The pump is working fine. I've called for repair help but wondered if anyone had seen this before and had thoughts about what to look for or expect in terms of repair. Thanks.

P.S. sorry for the multiple times this posted...I erased the stragglers...

[chas]

Do you have the programmable on/off timer? If not, do you leave it on 24x7 and it was off when you got up? Does unplugging it and plugging it back in fix the issue or does it just happen again immediately?

[chas]

Check this old thread and see if this sounds like what you are seeing.

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=378&p=3012&hilit=B ... iler#p3012

[dansf]

I have no timer; I usually leave it on 24/7. I turned it on/off, plugged/unplugged, on/off again interspersed with various prayers and incantations. No change and a different situation than describe in that thread. The repair guy said the boiler heater had failed, and he has order a replacement. He had no insights into what might have caused the failure.

[chas]

One of the alarms is supposed to trigger when you turn it on cold if the boiler doesn't get to 60C within 5 minutes. I guess the fault in having the alarm set up like that is that it probably won't alarm if the boiler is already up to temp when the group heater element fails. So there really should be another alarm where after the temp is above 60C, if if goes below 60C with the machine ON it will also alarm.

However, if you let the unit cool completely down (by default I guess it is now!), unplug it and then restart it, you should get that alarm after 5 minutes. (VII turns off with the two red LEDs on.)

[dansf]

That (alarm after restart) definitely has not occurred. I'll alert the repair person. Might this suggest the problem is not the heating element itself but something in the controller?

[chas]

You can narrow it down further if you have access to a Digital Voltmeter. Using the AC voltmeter function, check to see of you have 110V across the group boiler heating elements when the device is on and indicating that it is heating up. If this is the case and the boiler is not heating, that pretty much flags the problem as a bad heater element. However, if there is no voltage across the boiler heater element leads, then the issue is probably either with the controller board or with the triac.

The triac is basically a high voltage switch, it turns on the 110V to the heater element based on a low voltage signal from the controller board. The triacs fail more often than the controller boards and they're also the easiest part to replace and the cheapest. **

If you aren't getting voltage to the boiler element and feel confident enough to try this, you can swap the two triac boards. If it's truly a bad group boiler triac, after the swap you will have a working group boiler and a non-working steam boiler (until you can order a replacement board). I think they are only $25-$30.

** You didn't mention the age of your V2. If it is within the last couple of years you may have the new Dual SSR module rather than two separate triacs. If so, ignore the above triac discussion.

[dansf]

Wanted to close out this thread...the repair of the brew boiler heating element ended up being more complicated than expected b/c the repair guy could not remove the thermostat from the heating element so a new thermostat also had to be ordered. Once element/thermostat were replaced, everything moved ahead smoothly. Still no explanation for why the blocking alarm did not go off, but I decided I'd rather have a working machine back on my kitchen counter than spend more time diagnosing that mystery. Per the repair guy and the folks at Chris Coffee with whom he consulted, this sort of heating element failure is not common so one wonders/worries if there is an underlying issue still to be discovered. Time will tell...

[chas]

I'm not sure whether not getting the alarm as described in the manual is all that meaningful. Heater element problems happen more often with the steam boiler than with the group boiler and the alarm for the same problem on the steam boiler has definitely been seen. However, as was noted, this issue in the group boiler is less likely. Most of the issues with the group boiler element reported previously actually tripped the user's GFI circuit before the machine could be on long enough to trigger an alarm. Most issues are due to a short in the heater element probably caused by some water leaking inside the "water tight" cover around the heater element which is why the GFI gets triggered. It sounds like you had a much rarer open circuit condition in the group heater element caused by an actual break in the element wire.

It's possible that the group boiler alarm as described in the manual doesn't actually work and perhaps never has on any shipping V1/V2. If you start with a cold, working S1/V2, disconnect the group boiler element wires, and then turn the machine on that would tell the tale. If you get no alarm after 5 minutes, then the alarm doesn't really exist and/or LaSpaz has a bug in their software.