DIY Electric Kettle Repair: Fixing Your Appliance at Home

Hello Everyone!

This morning my wife woke me up with some unpleasant news.
She told me with a worried voice that she couldn't make morning coffee because the electric kettle wouldn't turn on.
So I had to light a fire in the stove to be able to brew coffee for my beloved.

When the coffee was ready and we had finished drinking it, it was time to solve the kettle problem, and that's when I remembered you, my readers.
After all, practically everyone now has this device in their kitchen.

Diagnosing an electric kettle malfunction.

Attention! All further manipulations should be carried out on the device that is disconnected from the power supply!

Before getting inside the device, you first need to determine which part of the device is not working. To do this, we will use a universal tester unit.

First, we need to make sure that the kettle's heating element is working without disassembling the device. To do this, we remove the kettle from the base and turn on the power button, which closes the electrical circuit. We take our tester, turn it on in the continuity test mode. If there is no such mode, then the resistance measurement mode is suitable, and we touch the tester probes to the external contacts of the electric kettle.

We should hear the tester beep if everything is okay or see a change in values on the device in resistance measurement mode. The resistance value of the working heating element of the electric kettle should be within 50-200 ohms, but we can hear from the sound that the device is working.

So, the problem is in the kettle base itself.
To verify this, we touch the tester probes to the contacts of the kettle base plug and at that moment we place the kettle itself on the base with the button in the "On" position.

At the moment of placing the kettle on the stand, our device should signal that the circuit has closed, but nothing happens. This means that the problem is definitely with the stand!

Repair

We take a screwdriver and open it up.

We see that one of the contacts has melted its seating due to overheating and has lost its proper geometry.

To solve this problem, we need to remove the contact pad and clean the areas of poor connection.
In places of poor contact, sparks occur, which lead to overheating of the contact pads, loss of their elasticity and conductivity. And so on until a fire occurs!

Using a knife (or emery paper/nail file), we process the surface where the contacts touch each other. We tighten the clamp with pliers, which has also lost its elasticity due to overheating. We loosen the spring-loaded contact for better contact and screw it back on.

We assemble the stand back together.

Now we need to make sure that we have done everything correctly.
To do this, we place the kettle on the stand, turn it on with the button and measure the readings on the tester at the plug.

We should hear a sound signal or see the resistance value of the circuit if our device is in resistance measurement mode.

That's it! We have made sure that everything has been done correctly and we can hand the device over to the wife in the kitchen.

Thank you for reading to the end!

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All pictures were taken by me on an old Samsung smartphone!

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I wish you all a peaceful sky above your head and stable soil under your feet! Take care of yourself and your loved ones so that you can meet again in the hive!