Taking Apart MIELE 5210 Vacuum Cleaner

This is my vacuum cleaner.

Miele S5210.

It’s a Miele S5210. It’s a very, very good vacuum cleaner. Well, it was until the point that it broke! Actually I was
somewhat responsible for that. For a little while now I have been restoring a car (OK, almost 6 years but I am nearly
done – www.asciimaton.co.nz/pics). After weeks of filling and sanding of filler I finally sent it off to the panel beaters to
be painted. This left me with a garage full of sanding dust. I swept up what I could the used the vacuum to clean up the
rest. Unfortunately your average house vacuum isn’t really designed to handle lots of very, very fine filler dust. I ended
up clogging it up and the motor stopped running smoothly and instead started stuttering. I needed to take the vacuum
cleaner apart to clean it and remove all the dust so it would run properly again. What follows is the procedure I used to
take the vacuum cleaner apart. I imagine the process is probably similar to other Miele vacuum cleaner models.

You don’t need many tools to take the vacuum cleaner apart. Just a Torx T20 driver and a small flat screwdriver to push
on the plastic clips that holds the parts together. All the screws used to hold it together are the same. The Torx bit
shown here is actually a tamper proof Torx bit with a hole in the middle but it works fine on the screws. Click on any of
the pictures for a larger view.

torx20 Torx screw and T20 Torx driver bit.

First unplug the vacuum cleaner and remove the bag and all the filters. The small silver honeycomb filter just clips in
place. Remove this so you can then remove the lid.
removinglid The clips holding the lid on.

The lid just slides onto the hinges and two small square clips hold it in place as shown above. Depress the small squares
and then slide the lid off the hinges.

The large honeycomb filter is also just clipped in place. Carefully push back the two clips shown circled above and the
filter should come out.

rearplastic Rear plastic piece.

The plastic piece at the rear between the two buttons is also just held in place by clips. Brute force will remove this. Just
yank it upwards and it will pop loose.
speedselector1 Removing the speed selector.

With the rear cover removed you should see two screws holding the speed selector part in place. Remove these.

speedselector2 Clips holding speed selector in place.

With the two screws removed the speed selector can be removed by pushing in the small clips that hold the front of it in
place and lifting it off. This piece just contains the knob that controls the speed. The knob has a stalk that sticks down
underneath it that fits into a selector switch on the electronics board.

topcover Top cover screws.

The top cover is held in place with four screws shown, two at the front and two down deep holes in front of each button.
Undo these then the top cover should lift off.

electronicsboard1 Top cover removed.

electronicsboard2 Electronics board plug.

With the top cover removed you can see the electronics board. It’s pretty simple really and doesn’t have much on it. The
board should be free to pull off now. The only thing holding it in place is the connector shown above. Simply unplug this
connector and the board will lift off.

motorcover Inner cover.

With the electronics board removed you should be able to see the screws holding the inner cover in place. There are
three at the back and one in the centre as shown above. Remove all these screws.

coverclips Clips holding inner cover.

As well as the four screws there is a clip either side of the cover on the sides of the vacuum. You can simply pop these
apart by hand then the inner cover should lift off. There is a small rubber hose that goes between the cover and the cord
retractor mechanism which you also need to disconnect from the cover (it will probably just fall off anyway).

coverremovedInner cover removed.

With the inner cover removed you can now remove the motor (which has a foam pad over it) and the cord retracting
mechanism. The only trick here is to unplug the connector that joins the two together.

motorplug Motor connector.

The motor and cord retractor will simply lift out. I gave everything a good cleaning to get all the dust out. I used my air
compressor to blow it all clean. With all the dust removed from the motor I sprayed it’s brushes with electrical contact
cleaner. I didn’t go as far as dismantling the motor itself (March 2010 – OK, I did eventually See below!).

brushes Contact cleaner for the brushes.

The brushes are either side of the motor and I simply sprayed cleaner into the hole at back of them.

After letting the contact cleaner dry I put the motor, cord retractor and electronics boards temporarily back in place the
tested the vacuum. You need to be VERY careful doing this as nothing is properly attached and there are exposed mains
connections that will bit you it you touch them (don’t ask how I know). Also the vacuum motor is extremely loud when
not encased in plastic!

Once everything was cleaned and working again reassembling the vacuum cleaner is basically the revers of taking it
apart. Make sure you reattach the small rubber hose and also make sure the cord and plug are free and don’t get caught
when screwing all the pieces of the case back together.

After my cleaning and spraying the motor with contact cleaner the vacuum is working nicely again. I know now I should
really get a nice shop vac for cleaning the garage and leave the Miele for purely domestic duties!

I can really recommend these vacuums. They are good value for money and very powerful. And now, having seen how
they look inside, I can say they are very nice quality too.
Update March 2010.

I have had a few people comment that this page was useful so I decided to post the second part of my vacuum cleaning
story in case people find this further detail helpful.

My cleaned up vacuum worked well for a little while but then the motor started stuttering again until eventually it
stopped running altogether. Another tear down was in order. This time right down to the motor itself. Again the nice
design of the Miele made this an easy job to tackle.

First you need to remove the motor from the vacuum as described above. Then carefully tap off the metal shield on the
end of the motor exposing the blower fan. Next remove the nut holding the blower fan in place. Now it was a few
months ago that I did this but from memory the nut is a reverse threaded one, i.e. turn it clockwise to undo it. This
allows you to pull off the aluminium blower and the flat spacer washer.

IMG_7605_1 Nut and blower removed.

Next you can lift out the two carbon motor brushes. These are simply held in with spade connectors so you can just pull
them straight out. In the picture below you can see the female spade socket on the face of the stator housing.

IMG_7608_1 One brush already removed. The other still in place.

The brushes are nice and long so should last a very long time.You can see the long male spade connector on the bottom
of the brass housing. You can also see how despite my previous cleaning this brush is still covered in sanding dust. If I
didn’t mention it above I should say don’t sand filler off a car (http://asciimation.co.nz/pics/page18.html) then use this
vacuum to collect the dust!

IMG_7606_1 Nice brush. Boom! Boom!

With the brushes removed (and cleaned up with electrical cleaner) you can remove the stator. There is a metal spring
clip that holds it in place. If you press this down the stator should then slide out.

IMG_7610_1 Spring clip holding stator down.

The electronic controller is attached to the stator and will come put with it. You can see the top of a TO220 type device
sticking out of the top of the plastic housing. We get to that in a minute. The inside of the stator and housing were both
covered in the sanding dust so I cleaned these up as well.

IMG_7611_1 Stator removed. Note the electronics are still attached.

Next you can carefully pull out the rotor. This has bearings on each end and the lower bearing is a press fit into the
housing. You need to carefully pull this out. The rotor will come out in one piece. Be careful not to lose the little flat
spring washer though.

IMG_7612_1 Rotor removed.

The observant of you will probably have noticed one of the problems with the motor. The commutator on the end of the
rotor, that ring of copper strips the brushes rub against, are filthy and scored. To fix this I carefully mounted the rotor in
my mini-lathe. You only need to grip it very lightly in the three jaw chuck. I made sure it was running true and turned it
on. I then used some fine wet and dry sandpaper folded into a long strip to carefully sand down the commutator.

IMG_7614_1 Rotor mounted in lathe.

I didn’t try to get the commutator perfectly smooth as I didn’t want to sand too much away. It still has a few small scores
around it but it doesn’t need to be perfect. The deep scoring is actually where the edges of the brushes are in contact
with the commutator so the brush is in contact with smooth copper on most of it’s face.

IMG_7615_1_1 Commutator after sanding.

Next I cleaned up the aluminium blower which was quite clogged with dust. A bit of electrical cleaner and a poke around
the fins with a long cable tie did the trick.

IMG_7617_1
After doing all this and cleaning everything to remove all the dust I reassembled the motor. Since I had given it a good
clean with electrical cleaner I left the motor on top of my dark coloured garage roof to make sure it was fully dry before
trying to run it again. I wanted to make sure all the cleaner had evaporated out of the motor and windings.

Unfortunately after putting it back in the vacuum cleaner and reassembling everything (with a little Loctite around the
rotor bearing where it pressed into the housing) the motor was still dead! I had to take it apart again. This time I
removed the motor, opened that up and removed the motor electronics. Again thanks to nice design this module just
unclips since it is held in place with spade connectors.

IMG_7625_1 Motor electronics.

The electronics on the motor are incredible simple. Basically it’s just a TRIAC and what I think is a thermal cutout device.

IMG_7626_1 TRIAC and thermal cutout thingy?

About now the problem was pretty obvious. This TRIAC was burned out! A close inspection and a little prodding showed
that TRIAC was burned out. Two of the legs were not even connected to the body anymore.

IMG_7628_1 Well there’s your problem!

I am not sure why this happened. I am guessing a combination of a badly connecting and arcing commutator and a
motor clogged with sanding dust ended up cooking things. The TRIAC itself is a T2550h 600T which is a 25 amp TRIAC.
These are available in NZ but not from the easy places like Jaycar or Dick Head Smith (who don’t really do electronics
anymore despite their name). You can probably get them from the bigger suppliers like Farnell or RS but they would cost
a bomb and you might not be able to buy just one. So I looked on eBay and found someone in the UK sells them for just
a couple of quid. I ordered one of them.

This is the data sheet for this particular part: http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/stmicroelectronics/6697.pdf