2024-09-25

Repairing rather than returning

A couple months ago my fairly old drip coffee maker stopped working and was beyond repair. I tried. My well water is "hard" which is to say it has a very high level of dissolved minerals, mostly calcium. This was the cause of the coffee maker failure even with fairly regular use of vinegar to remove mineral build-up. Rather than replace it I've been boiling water in a pot on my induction cooktop and using my French press. Go ahead well water try to kill that pot.

I probably should have stuck with that option because it works fine. But I had $25 credit at BestBuy that was about to expire so I used it to purchase an electric kettle which I think would also be safe from calcium build up. In any case it arrived last week but the base of it was broke. UGH.They didn't even ship it in an outer brown box. Just the product box which was a bit banged up. I opened it up and could see a couple bits of black plastic and that the center heating element was loose.

My feeling of guilt for having purchased a new appliance that I absolutely did not need suddenly doubled with the notion of shipping it back for an exchange or refund. That would just result in the whole box being chucked into a dumpster and that, after my taking a special trip to drop it off at the local shipper and shipping it back. Waste compounded upon waste. So, no return. I would just keep it and accept the loss and I would try to fix it myself.

I accepted the mistake and set about trying to fix it. I could see that the center element was loose but if I popped it back in place the weight of the kettle pushed it back out of place.

I flipped it upside down and it seemed like two pieces that were being held together by a series of 3 or 4 plastic clips. I used a screw driver and was able to unseat the first clip. Moved on to the next one and then the next.

I was able to pull it apart enough to see that there were 2 screws holding it in place. The heads of those screws were under the little silver UL label so I removed that to discover that the screw heads were little proprietary triangles. I'd already decided I would not return so I pried further assuming there was a good chance it would crack which it did. The piece came right off and it was easy to see that at least two plastic tabs had broken before or during shipping but I had both.

A circular black plastic part about 8 inches in diameter. There are several plastic elements such as a circular ridge of black plastic with tabs in the center. There appears to be a large drop of water along the edge of the inner circle of plastic which is, in actuality, dried glue

A big dollop of glue on both sides of the black tab. I went back 20 minutes later and added a bit more. This is the bottom piece and those tabs help hold the upper heating element in place. It looks like another also broke and was missing from the box.

A circular black plastic part about 8 inches in diameter. There are several plastic elements such as a circular ridge of black plastic with tabs in the center. There is a black wire coiled into the center which splits into two and is connected to two copper colored metal clips. There is clear glue all around the inner plastic ridge where the two broken pieces have been glued together

I applied the glue heavily along the underside of the heating element component and made sure some of it squeezed through to the other side in the hopes it would form a better bond

A black plastic disk with a molded circular center is raised up from the flat disk. That raised section has what appears to be a small stem or knob with a groove and a smaller center circle within that.

It looks a bit messy but my goal is that it not come apart and the kettle sits on the base so I'm not all that concerned if it looks a bit messy.

The fix was pretty simple. I used gorilla glue to secure one tab back on the bottom cover. I tried glueing a second much smaller tab but could not get the tab inserted and still work with the glue. If you've never used it, well, it's tricky. You mix it and then you've got a couple minutes to use it before it starts to harden. After futzing with the second tab I decided to just skip it and layer on the glue. Most of it on the inside with a little on the outside. It looks a bit messy but after 2.5 days of curing I was pretty confident that the repair would hold. I snapped the bottom cover back in place and put some water on to boil for tea.

The repair held up fine. The water boiled. I had tea. There will come a day when this kettle stops working but today was not that day. Today I had tea and celebrated a small victory.