How to Trouble Shoot a Coffee Grinder

Video Transcript:

Hi guys I'm Joel from Artisti Coffee Roasters and today we're going to be talking about grinders. Now more specifically we're going to be talking about things that you can check on your grinder when it's not working before you call the service team. We get calls every week from people saying “my grinders not working help me”. Watch this video check everything that we talked about before you call your service tech.

 So, the first thing that I'm going to talk about today is some very obvious things like is your power plugged in? Have you tripped the circuit? Can you see any lights being displayed on the grinder? If you can see these lights being displayed there's power to your grinder. That's definitely the first thing that you need to check up on.

 From there the next thing that you need to check is that you have beans getting down into your grinder. Now it seems pretty simple right? If you can see beans in there they must be going into your grinder. Not necessarily! On both of these grinders we have what's called a hopper slide, so if you take the hopper off you can close off the beans so it doesn't flow out. If you have that closed and you put it back on your grinder then it'll grind for a little bit because there's a certain amount of retained beans in there. That'll work through and then it'll stop grinding.

So, the next thing I want you to check is hat your hopper slide is open all the way out in the open position. This will allow the coffee beans to flow through into the grinder. The other thing that I want you to check as well is that your hopper is located correctly onto your grinder. At the back of most hoppers or some somewhere on a hopper it'll have a little pin or something along those lines. If this isn't inserted into the correct position then the grinder there's a safety mechanism that stops the grinder from switching on. So this one is just the location pin straight in the back. This one here you have to wind on and tighten.  

So the next thing I actually want you to check is your grind particle size. Now what can happen is if we make an adjustment with the grinder motor not in action we can jam down on the beans and jam the blades. This means when we go in and try and restart our motor it doesn't have enough power to unjam it. So the easiest thing to do is to just get the grinder collar and adjust it to be a coarser grind. You can go quite a bit coarser and then try and turn your motor on and see whether the motor will engage. Same thing here with this grinder here wind it out to make it coarser, see if the motor will engage and then make your adjustments finer. The other thing I'd recommend is if you're making large adjustments finer, to actually have your motor running whilst you're doing this and that will avoid jamming the blades onto the beans.

 So the next one that we're going to look at is any blockages from where the coffee is being ground through to where it's actually being dosed. In this particular grinder it's quite simple, we can pull off the top and have a look in there to make sure there's no impediments blocking that. If there is, clear them out and make sure the coffee can pass right through to where we're dosing. This one having a dosing chamber is slightly different, it'll actually have a switch up the top here. The design of that switch is to engage and switch the grinder off when this hopper is filled up. Sometimes they can get stuck so make sure that that's moving freely and the that is not stopping your grinder engaging. The other thing is if you're using something like a dosing tool  and it's dropped in there it could be holding that switch as well . Clean everything out in there and make sure that that switch is moving freely and then try and engage your grinder again. 

The last thing I want to talk about and for you to keep an eye on is the life of your capacitor. In all of these grinders they have a capacitor that holds a charge and surges to get the motor spinning. If you're getting any delay from the point when you switch your motor on or engage your motor to when it actually kicks in then it's time to look at the capacitor. You probably need to contact your service tech for that but that's something that if you notify them sooner rather than later that'll help your grinder and stop that motor from burning out. 

I hope you found this information useful. Please like the video subscribe to our Channel and stay tuned for more tips and tricks like this.