My Pro cooling tray arrived a few days ago and I did my first trial of it today. Here are my impressions.
The Good
Assembly and installation are easy. All needed parts are included, but be careful…if you use the bean bag chute you will need all six screws and there are no extras in the box.
There is a manual button on the bottom front of the bowl that works great if you want to watch the wiper arms spin around without doing anything. Seriously, though, the button comes in handy if you leave cooling mode before dropping the beans since that causes the arms to stop turning.
The cooling tray operates automatically with the Bullet, turning on and off with cooling mode.
There is a chaff screen instead of a foam filter in the tray assembly, very much like the one in the bullet. The chaff collector removes easily for emptying and then reattaches with the same ease.
Bean dropping is a new thing with the Pro tray. You can attach the included bag chute and fill bags directly from the tray. It’s a really nice feature if you are distributing beans in bags. If you don’t need the chute attached you can hold a dish below the bean drop and catch the beans that way. As I alluded to above, the arms must be rotating for the beans to be dropped out of the tray. Speaking of the bean drop; it leads me to my only real negative…
The Bad
On my unit the bean drop door has a rather sloppy fit and doesn’t raise up enough to seal off the bean drop hole which could easily result in beans spilling out onto the floor. Fortunately I can push it up with my finger and so far it stays put until I lower the handle. I am going to examine the hinge system on the door and hopefully find a way to snug it up, but if that fails I will look at some other method to get it to stay up. I’m a bit leery of just trusting it to stay up when I’m not really sure that it will. This is something that should have been fixed before sending these out. It’s not a deal killer, but it would have made me pretty mad if I hadn’t noticed it before doing a roast and spilling a bunch of beans.
The Stuff That Doesn’t Matter
I’m not positive about this since I haven’t done any actual time trials, but it seems to take longer to cool the beans than the R1 tray did. I won’t complain about that because both trays cool the beans faster than my old Hottop did, and I was happy with it.
