Thanks Bruce,
Yes I did have the fan in position under the roaster in the correct orientation.
I bought a small fan from Amazon and placed it where it will blow on the circuit board enclosure. I ran another roast of 800g tonight and watched the info box and the circuit board temp never went above 62C, so problem solved. I’ll run a couple of back to back roasts this weekend and see if the board gets hot under those conditions.
Another problem that I had was: when I was roassting some Natural Ethiopian beans that have excessive amounts of chaff and had dropped them in the cooling bowl, it took forever for them to cool down. I pulled the bowl and the filter in front of the fan was completley covered with chaff and had stopped the air flow. I vacuumed the chaff up and put the bowl back in to finish cooling.
When I was reading through some of the threads on Slack, I came across a thread about chaff managment and Jeromes cooling system. @Jacob said “you can remove the filter and put a bigger external filter or cloth bag for chaff collection, this seems to work well”
So, since I had a new fan on the circuit board, I took an old Coffee Bean Corral cloth bag and taped it to the back of the cooling unit. It actually worked well. The chaff went right through the fan and got trapped by the bag. I think that I will sew a new cloth bag with a looser weave material. I should be able to run many roasts before having to empty the bag. I am comfortable doing this because I now have that extra fan blowing on the circuit board.
In the photo below, you can see the fan and the cloth bag.
I do the same… run a small fan like that pointing at the belly of the roaster, but my cooling tray fan I turn 90 degrees to the right in order to fit a vent hose to direct the exhaust to my range hood vent. I didn’t want the hose running beneath in order to get max air flow below. I regularly roast 1kg now and I will still get a yellow warning for about 2 mins (and I also avoid roasting when it’s 90+ F outside).
Hah! I missed that. Makes sense. Must make cleaning the fan a pain and the bag would definitely interfere with any power board cooling from the cooling tray fan. So your Amazon fan sounds perfect. [ I once apologized to our mail carrier for all the Amazon packages. I told her ‘I’ve about got things worked out and I’ll stop buying all this stuff from Amazon’. She chuckled and said ‘don’t make promises you won’t keep!’ ]
I don’t think cleaning the fan will be that bad. High velocity air flow and not much smoke. (I rarely go past the end of first crack)
I will get another muffin fan to keep on hand as a spare. They’re cheap enough not to break the bank.
I found some mesh bags that are used for keeping bugs off of fruit on trees and ordered some of them from Amazon. (Yeah, my Amazon delivery people love me too. lol Luckily my spousal unit can’t tell how much my green bean supply is growing… Over 200 pounds in the cupboard. )
I just ordered an extra chaf collector from Sweet Marias and already have an extra chaf filter so that I can just change out the chaf collector, hot on the fly, without losing momentum for the next roast.
I’ve lost the links for parts ordering from Sweet Maria’s. How did you order Aillio replacement parts from them? I vaguely recall having to use the Coffee Shrub site but couldn’t locate anything there using their search tool.
I emailed: Info Sweet Maria’s Customer Service [email protected]. It took a couple of days for them to answer. In this day and age that seems like a long time, but really wasn’t that bad. Erik was the person who responded to my email.
BTW: I responded to your message last night. I guess it didn’t go through. Hmmm…
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