Can anyone point to the most up-to-date maintenance guide with what you should be doing and how often for the R1v2? (outside of cleaning the chaff filter, chaff collector, impeller, cooling tray, ITBS)
I see some older guides and many one off topics having to do with maintenance, and also see that there are 5 individual topics on the main Aillio page under Support > Maintenance
Hoping there is a more clear cut guide to what you should be doing/watching for and when.
*It would be great if the most up-to-date guide was pinned.
You found it. Video format. There’s also the Aillio → Support → General → Online Manual which touches on it.
Beyond that search here on roast.world Community for user-provided maintenance ideas.
In addition the sweetmarias.com site has Bullet maintenance info. Actually, it’s been awhile since that info published so you may have to look on legacy.sweetmarias.com to find the link. It’s old but still pertinent.
As a starter, beans with a lot of chaff will require vacuuming the collector thru the rubber trap at the bottom every one or two roasts. In any case clean the chaff filter after every session. For some here a session is one or two 350g roasts while for others it may be 10 or more 1kg roasts. The on-line manual mentions a total green weight for certain maintenance steps. The range is broad as it depends on the beans (oil, chaff, final temp of the roast).
Some here use dish washing detergent for cleaning others use Simple Green. Stronger cleaning agents will require gloves (useless roasting great coffee if you can’t pick up the cup!). Paper towels work ok for cleaning but soften and I suspect leave trace amounts of paper residue so I prefer the cotton bar towels… which leaves trace amounts of cotton fiber but I think it’s less.
Not mentioned elsewhere in any official sense, but I keep track of the maximum difference between IBTS and BT during the early part of the roast (pre-YP). With my 550g batch size that difference should be greater than 40F°. If it drops below that it indicates IBTS needs cleaning. That error can become substantial if you don’t do the cleaning (cotton swab plus alcohol) and that means the preheat temp will be higher than you think it is. The IBTS-BT temp difference will be greater with smaller batches and less with larger batches. The BT probe is largely independent of batch size which makes it a decent reference.
I used Simple Green at a higher concentration than the pre-packaged supermarket spray bottle ones. You can find “full concentration” at places like home improvement stores and dilute it yourself. I think I used a 2 part SG to 3 part water.
I also found these little OXO cleaning brushes that actually works really well for cleaning the squirrel cage and the housing of it, as well as everything in the chaff collector, the bean chute area, the face place (after you open it up), etc.
Sweet Marias has a cleaning document posted on their site that is also very handy and has pictures!
I’ve had good results using baking soda and warm water.
Those brushes look good, Blacklabs.
Bruce, I’m gonna go back and look at some of my roast profiles to begin patterning my temp changes like you do…but in Celsius. I noticed in my last roast session that 1C was at a different temp than expected.
I noticed in my last roast session that 1C was at a different temp than expected.