Cleaning autofill probe in steamer question

#1: Post by **jgood** » July 31st, 2021, 9:09 pm

I have the Quick Mill Carola and Companion Steamer --essentially a DB in two boxes. The steamer is spitting a little water and I thought perhaps it was overfilling the boiler a little. I was advised by Chris Coffee to try cleaning the rods that sense the water level (one for low, one for high) and see if that helped. They are not coming off the boiler easily and I am afraid I will break something. Do I need to remove the insulation from the boiler and hold the boiler with a strap wrench? Can I just hold the bottom nut with a wrench and unscrew the top one? Will that let the rod come out? Attached is a screen grab from a catalogue of the part in question.

August 1st, 2021, 12:20 am

jgood wrote: Can I just hold the bottom nut with a wrench and unscrew the top one? Will that let the rod come out? Attached is a screen grab from a catalogue of the part in question.

I have removed the entire probe assembly (from big nut) for cleaning on our machine with no problem. Looking at the picture of the probe assembly I would say that yes , you 'should' be able to remove the probe rod for cleaning from just the small nut. However the question is what then happens to the white teflon rod insulator? If that comes out with the rod you're OK. If it remains in the hole of the larger nut during extraction you're still OK - until you reinsert the rod that might push the teflon spacer out of the nut and into the boiler.

Just loosening the small nut an ⅛th of a turn might be enough to determine what will happen by 'feeling' the resistance when unscrewing the small nut by hand.

I would also expect an impact wrench would remove the whole probe assembly from the larger nut with no difficulty - if it's reachable.

Hopefully someone else might have more experience.