otiscampbell's Full Review: Cuisinart DGB-600 10-Cup Coffee Maker
We bought this coffee maker almost 6 months and have tried to convince ourselves we like it but could not.
Why did we try so hard to like it? Because the concept is great and it is a very attractive coffee maker. We recently moved into a new house with stainless steel appliances and the Cuisinart looked great. Plus we loved the idea of dropping the beans in the night before and getting fresh ground coffee in the morning.
Unfortunately, this is the most poorly designed and/or manufactured appliance I have ever owned. Here are the problems from least significant to most significant.
1. The carafe dripped every time I poured a cup of coffee. You'd think that would rank high but just wait.
2. The mechanism for the drip stop would frequently get
stuck. The result would be any of the following.
> The drip stop wouldn't work and you have to wait for your coffee. Annoying but not terrible.
> The drip stop would catch and coffee continues to flow from the coffee basket after the carafe was removed. That's a bigger deal than having to wait for your coffee.
> The drip stop would get stuck in the "stop" position so that while the coffee maker was brewing while I slept the basket would fill with coffee and overflow out on to the kitchen counter. Nothing like waking up to 10 cups of coffee all over the counter and floor. I think that would qualify as really bad.
The lovers and defenders of the pot will say that I should clean my pot more often. First of all, that didn't matter. It happened after a cleaning. Secondly, what kind of quality design requires a thorough cleaning after each use!
3. The basket catch seems like a nifty design at first. It works on a spring so that you push a button on the side of the coffee maker that makes the basket pop out. Unfortunately, the catch is unreliable. In the best case, you have to push it in 3 or 4 times before the basket stays. In the worse case, it appears that it has popped in place but it hasn't. This results in a similar scenario to #2 where you wake up to a 10 cups of spilled coffee but you also get 5 scoops of wet coffee grounds to clean up.
In the past 5 or 6 months of almost daily use, number 2 or 3 occurred 20 times. This morning #3 occurred again. Just yesterday my wife painstakingly cleaned the entire pot and ran vinegar through it. The coffee maker was as pristine and clean as it had ever been and it stilled malfunctioned.
I would say that this product suffers from extremely poor design. From reading the reviews it is clear there are people who love this coffee maker and others who have a similar experience to mine. From that I can only conclude that Cuisinart has extremely poor quality control at their plant and some of these coffee makers are well made and others are not.
This idea does not need to be so hard to execute. I had a Mr. Coffee grind and brew for about 10 years that worked like a champ and never malfunctioned. The grinder finally quit working. It wasn't a slick as the Cuisinart. It had a simple design, nothing popped out or clicked in place, but it worked well. I wish they still made a grind and brew because I love the idea and their design executed it well.
If you are seduced, like I was, by the aesthetics and the concept be careful and return it at the first sign of malfunction. Maybe you can take your lemon back and get lucky and get one of the well made ones that others seem to have purchased. My best advice is to buy it at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. This morning, they gladly and apologetically allowed my wife to return it. They even overlooked the (small) dent I put in it this morning when I hit it in anger (I'm working on that, I promise). She exchanged it for a Krups stainless steel model. We lose some functionality but I'm going to save millions in grout cleaner.
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