After my latest cheap coffee maker died less than two months after purchase, I decided to invest in a more expensive and hopefully better one. I bought the Cuisinart model #DCC-1200 from a local store, who highly recommended this model as reliable and hard-working. “Almost everybody who works here, owns this model!” the salesperson told me.
We’ve owned it about a year now, and we’ve been very happy with it. It makes one cup as easily as twelve. I like having an option between using the gold filter or paper filters. (I eventually realized we were using so much water to clean the gold filter after each use, we switched back to paper ones.) It has a gentle “beep beep beep” alert when your coffee is done brewing, which is handy. It has a separate option for turning on the burner heat on early, so even a one- or two-cup brew session stays hot. It doesn’t look too dirty if you forget to clean it every few days.
There are, however, a few design problems with it that seem so easy to fix, it’s frustrating that Cuisinart hasn’t addressed them. And they all deal with water.
Pouring water into the reservoir is hard because the water only goes in on one “side”, and the opening is narrow. Lots of spills.
The carafe (a replacement carafe, by the way, costs almost half as much as the entire machine, with shipping—what’s up with THAT??) drips when it pours. We previously had a Black and Decker model (an earlier model lasted five years, the replacement model is the one that lasted two months) had a no-drip carafe—which never dripped! How hard would it be for Cuisinart to do that??
The worst water issue, though, is that condensation from the brewing process collects on the lid of the machine. And when you raise the lid to replace the filter/add water, it all drips off OUTSIDE the carafe and onto your counter surface. If you don’t stay on top of this (and with three young adults in our household, there are many things they don’t stay on top of), you will end up with a sizeable puddle over time. Yuk. Why couldn’t the lid hinge set INSIDE the reservoir, so the water just dripped back into it??
If these are the sort of things that would drive you mad, this is not the coffee maker for you. Otherwise, as I said, it’s been a good, reliable product. |
