My roaster just caught fire

[VertigoCycles]

Is it grumpy ass Thursday yet? The motor stalled, right at the end of first crack, for a reason I haven't discovered yet, and it takes about five seconds for flames to shoot out of everywhere. Burning beans seem to clump together, blocking the emergency bean dump chute. Luckily, I do this outside where I happen to keep a pressurized spray bottle to keep our dog from eating our raspberry plants (yes, the plants.)

It may be salvageable, but in case it's not, what roasters do you all like? Other than Hot Top.

[Too Tall]

My deepest sympathies.
If they EVER friggin' release this I'm all about it: Jake Kilo Roaster – Behmor
In the meantime pound sand. Get the same thing or consider roasting over the family BBQ. Not kidding.
I've been reading reddit on same topic >> Behmor Jake Roaster : roasting

[weavie]

Sorry to hear about the roaster fire.

I've stuck with the Behmor over the years because of the price. It's not perfect by any means but it's good enough. Personally, I wouldn't buy the Jake until maybe the 2nd or 3rd version and that's assuming it's an actual product that comes out.

I've been doing a lot of reading about the Aillio Bullet lately and I think it's probably better than the Huky or the Quest for me since it's a little more easily controlled and has a larger capacity but all three are what I think about when I consider moving up from the Behmor/Hottop type of roasters.

[Mark Kelly]

It may be salvageable, but in case it's not, what roasters do you all like? Other than Hot Top.

A cheap option is to buy a second hand breadmaker, a temperature controlled heatgun with variable air flow(I have found the Bosch unit to be very reliable) and invest in roaster control software: Roast Monitor plus a Heatsnob are OK apart from being rather sensitive to line noise.

This arrangement is called the "Corretto" after the person who developed it. It has similar kinetics to a spouted bed roaster eg it's between a fluidised bed and a drum roaster. With an ordinary heatgun it will do a good profile roast on 625g of beans* in about half an hour.

I have the heatgun mounted on a bike stand and the breadmaker on a trolley, I can put the ensemble together in three minutes and take it apart in two. A cooling tray is helpful: mine is a bathroom exhaust fan in a box. Works perfectly.


* I buy beans in 2.5 kg bags, a quarter of a bag yields 525g after roast losses, fits into a 500g bag fine.

[defspace]

This hits close to home. I caught my Behmor on fire. It took some time and a lot of cleaning to get rid of the smell. I think the internal reflectivity changed a bit after the fire, so I've had to adjust my methods a bit, but it works well enough that I haven't bothered to look elsewhere.

Fingers crossed you can get yours back in service. My Behmor 1600 (not the 1600+ or AB unit) has lasted several years, caught on fire and still makes me cheap coffee that tastes good. If it totally kicked the bucket, I'd probably just grab another Behmor because it works well enough and I'm familiar with the platform.

[VertigoCycles]

I still need to fully disassemble it to check the motor. After cleaning it up a bit, I ran it empty and there's definitely something going on in the motor housing. Something is scraping and I imagine that it seized and cause the motor stall, which caused the fire. Everything else appears to be working fine.

[tanghy]

Quest m3 is a good home unit

[VertigoCycles]

Once I had a chance to disassemble the machine...and the motor housing...I found a stripped gear. The motor output shaft is about 1/4" which drives a plastic gear that's the first part of a gear reduction. The teeth are so fine that it's not really a surprise that it stripped. Anyhow, I got hold of the guy at HotTop who was apparently impressed that I got the housing open and agreed to sell me a couple of replacement gears (one steel, one plastic) for $30. I'll take it, especially since they normally don't sell them and instead sell a new motor assembly for $150. With any luck, I'll be roasting again in a week.