Thursday, January 16, 2020

Fixit@Home - Rice cooker and the Thermal fuse

My mom has a large but basic rice cooker that has knob which flips between a “warm” and “cook” setting. Recently, however, it stopped working, so it had to be fixed. Of course, I took that responsibility. To start, I took apart the cooker by unscrewing a metal plate underneath it to expose its internals. Inside the cooker was a relay to the mains, a switch connected to the knob and wires connecting to heating elements. The first thing I had to do was test out whether electricity was flowing into the system, so I plugged the cooker in and used a multimeter to check.



Rice cooker, which would have been discarded or at most recycled, is now back in circulation by replacing a small component - thermal fuse.
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Electricity was getting into the system, so that wasn’t the problem. I took apart the switch assembly, and there was a simple circuit board with LEDs on it. The circuits weren’t shorted out, and everything looked alright, so the last thing I could possibly do before calling it quits was to check the continuity for all connections.

I kept doing this and received only good results, until I checked a connection between the mains wire and an insulated wire connected to a circuit bridge. It didn’t give a sign of continuity, so I disconnected the insulated wire and found out that it was actually a fuse, or more specifically, a thermal cutoff. This component was designed to stop delivering a charge if the input voltage from the mains got too high in order to prevent the cooker from spontaneously combusting. It had a burn mark on one of its leads, so I took the entire component out and tested for continuity. Surprise surprise, it wasn’t a continuous connection, so I searched up the component on Amazon and found a 5-pack selling for 6 dollars, so it wouldn’t be a problem replacing it. After receiving the part, I installed the new cutoff and put the cooker back together. It works now, but it’s still waiting for usage. 



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