Has your Sebo Evolution vacuum cleaner suddenly stopped working? It won’t switch on?
This can be an Evolution 300, an Evolution 350 or an Evolution 450. It can also be the Ensign 300, 350 and 450 Evo which is the same machine.
If your Sebo Evolution has stopped working, and especially if it is quite new, it is usually caused by whoever assembled and/or uses it failing to route the power cable properly. And now the cable has failed internally as a result.
This isn’t a problem covered by your machine warranty because:
- Power cables are a consumable and are not covered under the Sebo warranty
- A cable routed incorrectly as shown below is misuse which is not covered under the Sebo warranty
This means if you send a machine back for a warranty claim, and the power cable is at fault as described here, you will be charged for a repair.
These vacuums are usually bought by nursing homes, councils, housing associations, cleaning companies, schools and similar organisations. As such, the staff assembling and using them often don’t read the manual or can’t be bothered to familiarise themselves with how the cable should be routed. They don’t care – it isn’t their money.
The in-house maintenance men or electricians are unaware of the nature or cause of the fault and often fail to diagnose a faulty power cable correctly for reasons we will explain below. This leaves office staff, trusting in reports from other staff, trying to make warranty claims for machines that simply need a new flex. This creates bad feeling when they then get a repair bill that could have been avoided.
“My Sebo Evolution has stopped working” – This is one of those subjects that comes up quite often, and it is almost always the same cause. So we decided to do this blog post on the subject to save explaining ourselves over and over again to people. So if we have linked you here, please read all of it and show the salient bits to your relevant staff, in-house maintenance man or electrician.
Your Sebo Evolution power cord enters the machine here:
Staff who haven’t read the manual simply plug the flex in like this and start to use it:
This is wrong, wrong, wrong!
Using the machine this way allows the union where the wire goes into the plug to be pulled and flexed in a manner it was never designed to do.
The flex then breaks internally, and invisibly, here:
It can be the case that the break isn’t absolute. So it is possible to sometimes put a test meter on it and get continuity. But when the machine is turned on it won’t work as that continuity isn’t enough to allow for the load a motor draws.
Your electrician or in-house maintenance man needs to wiggle the plug above while his test meter is connected to each terminal in turn, and that will usually reveal the break in continuity. If you have more than one Sebo Evolution, try a flex from another machine that works.
On several occasions, we have had machines returned as ‘faulty’ where the electrician or in-house maintenance man has emphatically asserted that the flex isn’t faulty because he got continuity on a test meter. But he didn’t wiggle the plug. Why would he? He doesn’t know the machine has been used with the cable routed incorrectly, so doesn’t know what fault he is looking for.
However, if your Sebo Evolution has stopped working and the machine has been used with the cable just plugged in as in the second photo above, it’s pretty much a given that the flex is now faulty as described above. So save yourself a repair bill and buy a new cable, we sell them here: Sebo Evolution replacement power cord
It is not possible for the flex to fail at the plug union if the cable has been routed properly – because it will never move.
How to route the flex on a Sebo Evolution.
This is how it should be done. Remove the grey wand handle, plug the flex in…
Behind where the wand sits is a vertical channel that the cable can be clipped into…
Then locate it around these two hooks like so…
Then observe where it says push on the handle…
That is the lock for the cable loop, it stops the flex being damaged by pulling. Push that button and insert the looped cable in the aperture like so…
This design is so that the cable when pulled isn’t flexing at one given point – which as we have found out, makes the flex liable to break internally. Rather, it spreads the load across several inches of flex and makes it less inclined to fail prematurely.
Now you can use your Sebo Evolution as the nice people in Germany intended.
If you need a new Sebo Evolution power cord, here’s where to get one from:
We sell them here on our site: Sebo Evolution replacement power cord
We sell them >here on Amazon< and >here on eBay<
The Sebo Shop – part of Manchester Vacs – are approved Sebo dealers offering the full range of domestic and commercial Sebo vacuums together with consumables and spare parts.
