This is the second part of my series on my experiences while repairing electric and electronic devices. Here’s the first part. The following two devices were repaired during a local repair cafe session, where people bring their broken devices which are diagnosed and – if possible – repaired on the spot. The first item was a remote control for opening and closing a garage door. It had two SMD-soldered push-buttons, where one of the two had broken away while the owner was performing a battery exchange.
Since neither the solder pads nor the push-button had been damaged (likely it was already a bad solder connection), it was trivial to clean the solder-pads with some solder flux, apply solder and reconnect the button. A „third hand“ clamp is useful here, as you need one hand for the soldering iron, one for the solder, and yet another to fix the remote in place.
The second item was a heating device for making hot spiced wine. The owner told us that the device did not generate heat anymore. We opened it’s case and took a thorough look inside checking for visually obvious faults and electric ones with the multi-meter.
It turned out that the thermal fuse located at the center of the heating coils had been triggered. This was likely caused by the device running dry while the heating element was still on. Luckily the fix for this situation is quite easy, as the manufacturer already provides a way to reset the thermal fuse by pushing the grey rod (visible in the picture below). This can even be done without opening the case.
However, since access to the thermal fuse reset is at the bottom of the case (with no markings indicating the location of such a fuse) most people are unaware of this functionality. It would be better if the reset could be accessed from the side of the device, or if there were at least a marking pointing the user to the thermal fuse reset underneath.