The Sage Risotto Plus is a multicooker designed for making risotto, as well as other rice dishes and even soups. It is manufactured by Sage Appliances, a company that specializes in high-end kitchen appliances.
The Sage Risotto Plus features a built-in sauté function, which allows you to cook your onions and other aromatics directly in the cooker before adding your rice and liquid. This is a convenient feature that eliminates the need for a separate pan, and also helps to develop more flavor in your dish.
A quick background on the Sage Resoto Plus Cooker. I bought this about 2019, i had it for about 2 years. Sage is the upmarket British brand of Brevel Cookware. These are endorsed and advertised by Heston Blumenthal. I have quite a few of their products thinking that they were a quality make. Unfortunately now, my opinion has changed. I had a coffee maker, twin boiler which broke down just within the 2 year guarantee. Luckily, I had it fixed under the guarantee but had to produce the receipt first even though it had been registered on the Sage site.
Also, I had, on that occasion saved the receipt. Unfortunately, although fixed, with what I was assured was a new water pump, it broke again 1 year later. This time, it is the turn of the Resoto Plus cooker which has a number of recipe buttons to do everything from Resoto to steamed rice including slow cooking. For the price of the units, I would expect a lot longer life out of their products. I managed to fix the twice defective water pump in the coffee machine but here is what I found had broken in the Sage Resoto Plus…
The Problem...
So, just cooked some rice the evening before without a problem. Went to cook another batch the day after and the cooker would not get hot.
I stripped the unit down to reverse engineer what was going on inside.
On the front of the unit are the recipe buttons select and controller. This is powered from a small PCB which has the Switch mode power supply and main element switching relay. An NTC thermal resistor connects from a mechanical button which depresses in the middle of a circular heater (when weighted down) to the front panel along with the connection from the power supply.
Also, for which I can't work out, the live is also connected through this button. The button is for monitoring the temperature I guess. The mains connects to the power supply PCB but the heating element is switched via the neutral.
The power supply PCB which supplies the front panel and switches the main element with a relay on the right of the picture on the board.
It wasn't obvious though, that a thermal fuse was mounted under a bracket (circled in green) which was the cause of the issue.
Layout from the bottom
This is the general layout underneath the bottom cover. The mechanical button housing the Thermistor is in the middle. The negative wire which is switched from the power supply relay board has a thermal fuse attached with a bracket onto the base underneath the heating element. I marked it in blue on the image to the left. This was the reason the heating element was not connecting to neutral even when the relay was operating. It had overheated I guess and blown.
Initially, I tested the relay (although I could hear it switching) by taking it out and testing it on my adjustable power supply. When I found that to be OK, i discovered the in-line Temperature fuse. I ordered a replacement 10Amp 170 degree centigrade from Amazon amazingly on a next day delivery. After fitting I tested the unit was once again working. I had to order 10 but you never know with this design if it will ever blow again.
