Repairing your vacuum sealer

I am the proud own­er, since two years, of a Brandt vac­u­um seal­er, that I bought at Marjane. The SOU-110 is a very sim­ple machine (no pos­si­bil­i­ty to con­nect a hose to vac­u­um a jar), but that did the jobun­til a few weeks ago.

Why a vacuum sealer doesn't do it anymore (automatically)

Simplistically (again, but it's actu­al­ly good), the machine has three but­tons: "seal", "stop", and "vac­u­um seal".

"Vacuum seal" is the most inter­est­ing, of course: the food is put in the bag, the machine emp­ties and seals auto­mat­i­cal­ly as soon as it gets there.

And that's what didn't work any­more: the machine emp­tied, emp­tied, emp­tied, emp­tied, … and stopped. I could man­u­al­ly press "seal" of course, but the vac­u­um was not perfect.

After a long search on the inter­net, there were two pos­si­ble causes:

1. the bag was not air­tight (as I use rolls that I seal myself, I doubt­ed it, I checked, my bags were airtight)
2. the foam that press­es on the bag at the top is not strong enough any­more, and it's from the top that it "leaks".

That was it, and it was entire­ly my fault: I had for­got­ten to (RTFM) read the man­u­al, which rec­om­mends not to clip the machine when stor­ing it. When I looked very close­ly, I could see the mark of the bot­tom foam on the top foam.

How do you repair the foam in your vacuum sealer?

According to the inter­net, you can either:

1. replace the foam; it doesn't seem pos­si­ble for this mod­el, the instruc­tions say there are no spare parts, and any­way there is a huge prob­lem with the importer in Morocco: the con­tact on the brandt​.ma web­site is in France, and, accord­ing to Marjane, it's because of the importer that they would be out of stock of bags for a year now…
2. make your own foam with "high den­si­ty foam"… nev­er seen that in a DIY shop here, and the idea of run­ning all over Casa to find some even­tu­al­ly killed me in advance

I looked for a solu­tion, I searched on AliExpress. And then it hit me! The repair is extreme­ly easy, even if it is a bit painstak­ing. And there is absolute­ly no risk of dam­ag­ing your machine!

How did I repair my vacuum sealer?

I start­ed by turn­ing the machine upside down. The bot­tom foam can be removed, not the top. There is also a rub­ber on the front, which prob­a­bly helps to hold the freez­er bag, which can be removed for cleaning.

And all of a sud­den, idea…

Since the foam has flat­tened a bit, I thought that, with­out mak­ing a new foam, I could put some­thing under­neath (a card­board, a rub­ber…) that would lift it up a bit, enough to make a good seal.

A trip to the cup­boards. A men­tal thank you to my grand­moth­er who nev­er threw away any­thing that could be used (in total con­tra­dic­tion with my cur­rent search for min­i­mal­ism), by find­ing a sil­i­cone cake tin that had become unus­able after a knife had made a hole in the bottom.

Making a pattern for the mousse

It is quite dif­fi­cult to use the foam to make the pat­tern of the shape to be cut out of the sil­i­cone. The foam is not very rigid when tak­en out of its hous­ing, so you can't make an exact pat­tern. I had a hard time mea­sur­ing and end­ed up turn­ing my machine around to "pho­to­copy" the foam.

Cutting the foam shape out of the silicone

It all depends on what you are going to use. My cake tin wasn't big enough to cut into the bot­tom, so I peeled off the side, turn­ing it into a long strip. It's not com­plete­ly straight, but it's enough to cut the shape of the mousse cor­rect­ly. I used a met­al ruler and a cutter.

Be care­ful: cut a lit­tle nar­row. The sil­i­cone does not have to fill the space where the foam will be insert­ed com­plete­ly and per­fect­ly. It only needs to be wide enough to raise the foam.

Putting the foam back on top of the silicone

At this point, you will see that the machine clos­es prop­er­ly… and that it con­tin­ues the seal­ing oper­a­tion after the vac­u­um! Victory!

Even if you don't have sil­i­cone like me, but you use card­board or anoth­er mate­r­i­al, it doesn't mat­ter: the foam is there to close the bag, but it is not where the bag is closed (it is under the met­al bank, clos­er to the edge). So there is no risk of it melting!

Conclusions:

1. it is very easy to repair a vac­u­um seal­er yourself
2. it is bet­ter to read the manual
3. it is bet­ter to buy a machine for which spare parts are available

NB: the machine has been replaced by a new ver­sion, the SOU-110V. Comparing the data sheets, I have the impres­sion that there is no dif­fer­ence, except for the colour.

PS: I was very hap­py with this repair, because it allows me to sim­ply extend the life of a plas­tic assem­bly that I would have sim­ply replaced, a few years ago, with­out ques­tion. One day I'll have to tell you about "con­sume better".