Maintenance on an Arçelik Turkish coffee maker

2025-08-23 16:02:00

Earlier this week, I was gifted a Turkish coffee maker by a good friend of ours. Her family wasn't using it anymore and she'd heard how enthused I was about the Greek coffee I'd had at a restaurant. How awesomely sweet of them! 

As us geeks do, I wanted to make sure everything's in good working order. And thus I learned a few things about the machine. 

• The sticker on the back may say Arçelik TS 4788, but the actual model number is a few lines below: K 3190 P.
  
  
• The manual, in English, is over here.
  
  
• The water reservoir does not need to be pulled out to fill it up! If you grasp the handle and slide it out, a water inlet is exposed and you can simply pour water in through the handle. 
  
  
• If you want to clean the water reservoir, you will get the same thought I had: "why is my Arçelik coffee maker water reservoir stuck? why is it not coming out?". It's not stuck, you're just being too careful. Don't be aggressive with it, but you do have to exert quite some force to pull it out. What I like to do is pull out the handle, then use four fingers from both hands to push the handle outward, while using my thumbs to push against the housing: powerful force, without aggression. 
  
  This Youtube video shows how the machine is cleaned and operated. Funnily enough Youtube shows that the most-replayed portion of the video is when the user pulls the reservoir out of the coffee maker. :D
  
  
• The water level sensor is hilariously low-tech: there are two metal screws which are screwed from the outside into the water reservoir. These screws touch two copper contacts inside the machine, when the reservoir is properly installed. If enough water is in the reservoir, electrical current will pass through the water between the screws. 
  
  This Youtube video (linked to correct timestamp) shows the electrical contacts and discusses a common failure.
  
  
• If you do a test run, or cleaning run, with the machine with nothing but water you will get a huge cloud of steam. Worse: it will seem like your coffee maker is leaking a lot of water onto the countertop! 
  
  Don't worry, your machine is not broken. If you put nothing but water in the pots, the contents will boil a lot faster and stronger, then if coffee and sugar were in there. The huge steam cloud is because most of the water is being boiled off! I expect that, once coffee is in there, a lot less steam will be generated.
  
  
• The dial that's above the water reservoir, labeled I-II-III, is used to show how much water you want for one cup (III is the most). The manual has instructions on how to test (not measure) which setting you need for your cups.
  
  
• Want to see the insides of the machine? This video on Youtube shows a few of the PCBs in there (it's a lot more complicated than I expected!) and they show how liquid damage to one sensor PCB will result in the pot not being detected. 
  
  Here's another, much longer video which does a tear down. Around the 13:00 mark, this video discusses how an excess of steam is supposed to go up into the machine, be collected and then flow down into the bottom of the machine (which I saw happen in my case).
  
  And finally, a great video where the presenter replaces thermal fuses under the hot plates.

I'm looking forward to making my first cup of Turkish coffee! Now all I need to do is get the coffee itself. :D

kilala.nl tags: house,

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