Solving a Lelit PL62X Mara no water flow issue

So I was recently asked to have a look at a new Lelit Mara with a water flow issue. 

It arrived at the customer's house and was not pumping water (it was working before being shipped to the customer)

When I first turned the machine on, nothing really happened, the pump didn't kick in as you'd expect it to and when I opened the brew lever, no water flowed through the head.

The indicator lights were giving me an indication that the boiler filling time had been exceeded (the temperature light, the water level light and the pilot light were all flashing) This was a bit odd given that the machine had not even engaged the pump so after turning the machine off and disconnecting from the wall, I removed all the covers to see if I could see anything that had been disconnected during transit.

Everything looked good so I plugged the machine back in and this time the indicator lights were telling me that the temperature sensor NTC1 had been disconnected. I turned the machine off again, I checked all connections to the PCB were tight and turned it back on, this time the machine went back to giving me the boiler time out error. 

Not being familiar with this specific machine, I called a company who sells and services this model and was told to "contact the company who sold the machine, most of the time it's user error with the settings" (this was not particularly helpful advice considering the company who provided this machine to the customer had asked me to investigate for them since I was local to the customer who now owned the machine) but it did give me the idea to play around with the different settings buttons and this is when things started getting interesting. 

While experimenting with the X mode and the Temperature mode buttons, I noticed the error would occasionally change from the "Boiler filling phase has exceeded the maximum time" to the "machine on is stand-by" indicator.

I tried to turn standby mode off but it was not successful. This lead me to believe that something in the circuit was causing the machine to have a brain meltdown so I started working my way through each component.

My first thought was something in the water tank circuit so I tested the tank microswitch that is activated by water weight. The continuity was good and it was opening and closing the circuit as it should with and without water weight. 

Next I moved onto the reed switch, I tested continuity of the reed switch with an external magnet and the tank magnet and it was also working as it should. 

That's when I moved onto the brew lever microswitch I tested continuity of the harness plug at the PCB end for the group lever and found that I was getting a continuous connection regardless of which position the lever was in, I unscrewed the backing nut on the inside of the machine and repositioned the microswitch further back into the machine. Then I retested the continuity of the microswitch in the different lever positions and found it to be operating as normal now.

So feeling optimistic, I plugged the machine back in and fired it up and finally the pump kicked back into life and the machine started operating as normal. 

So the TLDR summary- the group lever microswitch was not positioned correctly, it was set too far forward which meant it was always in contact with the lever (regardless of lever position) on this model of machine, the way you set the standby mode is by turning off the machine, lifting the group lever and powering the machine on so effectively what was happening was the machine was constantly setting itself into and out of standby mode and causing it to have a complete brain shutdown. A super simple fix but a super annoying issue to diagnose.

I don't really know how this happened as the machine was working correctly before it was shipping but maybe the nut was a little loose and the microswitch wiggled a little in transit? who knows but what the end result was a happy customer and an even happier technician!

-Heather