Azuki Panda

So I was cleaning up around the house yesterday and noticed my Zojirushi NS-KCC05 rice cooker was kind of dirty both on the outside and inside. I decided to thoroughly wash it. I know that there is a lot of electronics for it and it says to not immerse in water, so I tried to wash it as delicately as possible. One problem was washing the inside. I rinsed the inside where the heating part is and then was about to dump the water out, but noticed that the water level was in fact going down. I had a slight panic attack as I thought the water was going into the rice cooker and was completely destroying the internal components. When I shut off the water there was water coming out from the bottom. The guys at Zojirushi had cleverly engineered it so that water will go out from holes in the bottom.

I guess I was not careful enough in washing the rice cooker since after I washed it I noticed the front LCD panel was blank. This is when I really started panicking since if I shorted out the internals that would be it for the rice cooker. I wiped off the rice cooker and then noticed that there was actually some water on the inside where the LCD panel was since there was a layer of plastic between the LCD and the outside. I thought if I left it to dry maybe it would be OK.

I then thought about it and remembered there was a watch battery inside to keep the clock on even when it was unplugged. Since there is the battery there as long as there is water inside there is the risk of shorting out vital components. I decided to take the plunge and disassemble the rice cooker.

On the bottom there is one screw holding the housing for the electrical cord. Once this screw is removed, the gray housing can be rotated counter-clockwise and removed. There are two wires leading to the housing - one red and one yellow. Make sure to take note of which one connects to which terminal.

The next step is to remove all of the screws holding the bottom plastic shell. There were a total of 4 screws, all philips heads. Make sure to have a screwdriver that is long enough since they are about 2″ (5 cm) deep. The hardest part for me was to get the head of the screwdriver into the actual screw since it’s hard to see so half of the time the screwdriver was actually going into the space to the side of the screws.

After the screws have been removed the bottom plastic shell just comes off with minimal force. The inside was wet and I could see moisture on the PCB (printed circuit board). They have this padding all around the sides on the inside and that was fairly damp as well. I set up a space heater to blow warm air into the rice cooker laying on its side for a few hours and it dried everything off nicely. This was just to speed up the drying process - it can be done just by letting it sit there and evaporate.

I checked back after a few hours and the inside was dry and the LCD was back on. Success!

Now just do everything in reverse order to assemble it back together.