Hi,

My 3 month old Hottop B has started to behave very strange. The main exhaust fan does not start no matter what step it is set to in the program. However I have noticed that the fan under the cooling tray reacts to the steps in the program. This is not intended...or?

The main exhaust fan is not completetly dead. I have noticed that sometimes during roasting or cooling it starts for a short period of time (typically 2-10 seconds)

Any ideas what might be wrong, and is this something I can fix on my own?

PS. I can tell for sure that I have not switched the 2 cables, since I have never had this roaster opened.

/Kim

Kim

That is very strange indeed.

After three months of use you are due for a good internal cleaning so I would go to the hottop website and go through their instructions (very carefully!) for dis-assembly and cleaning and then reassembling the roaster. Part of that takes the back fan off. You need to do this routine cleaning anyway. If your problem is not solved I would contact Michael at HotTop USA. He has always been great to deal with and you are under warranty as well.

Good luck - this does not seem to be a major problem to solve. RandyG may see this and comment as well.

Please forgive me for asking this, but have you tried manually increasing the fan speed?

Jim

I have unassembled the rear fan to tell exactly when it is on and when it is off. During this I also cleaned the fan even if it was not that dirty. But I haven't yet gone through the hole cleaning procedure of the machine.

And I have also both tried the auto program, a stored program and manually changed the fan speed. The result is the same, the fan under the cooling tray speeds up/down but the rear fan does not start, except from a few random short periods.

PS. my machine is the European 240V version.

/Kim

Unfortunatly I am not in possesion of neither equipment for measuring things like that oranother fan, so I can't test anything here at home. But I have now been in contact with Hottop in Taiwan and they are convinced that the fan needs to be replaced, so they will send me a new fan

What confused me regarding this issue is that both fans apparently always runs at the same time and speed. I guess the reason for this is to make it a simple as possible. In my mind it makes no sense that the cooling tray fan is running while roasting. Can anybody else confirm that both fans always are running at the same time and also that the fanspeed for the cooling tray fan is folowing the speed of the exhaust fan?

Well, while waiting for my new fan to arrive I will have to improvise another kind of airflow to being able to roast my christmas coffee. With 8 days to chritmas eve I don't have time to wait for the new fan My first thougt was to hold the use the vacum cleaner and a funnel ........Any other suggestions? Or would it be best to just forget about roasting until the fan arrives?

Thanks for allof your inputs.
/Kim

Both fans should not be running at the same time except when beans have been dumped and it is in the 5 min cooling cycle, the rest of the time the rear fan should be the only fan running.

You shouldn't need (either) fan to roast. In fact a few folks suggest not using it at all here:
Max's Final Hottop Drum Roaster Profile... for 2009!

germantown rob wrote:Both fans should not be running at the same time except when beans have been dumped and it is in the 5 min cooling cycle, the rest of the time the rear fan should be the only fan running.

On the D model, both fans run at the same time. The cooling tray fan blows up through a hole in the bottom of the roast chamber under the chaffe tray. How much good it does, due to the several inch gap, is unknown.

So does anybody know if the newer B models have the hole and both fans run at the same time?