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Stay AWAY from this little thing- I would give it barely one star.It was nice for the first month or two then it just got clogged. I am handy with mechanics so I was able to disassemble and reassemble the thing, but then a month later the same problem again. We finally threw it away and went back to 10 year old our old blade grinder instead which works about 20X better. Big Disappointment from a Krups product and a big waste of money.
I had the same problem until I looked at it a little more closely. I make single cups of coffee with a ceramic dripper and am pretty generous with the grounds. It's a beautiful little product. I have an incredibly small kitchen so appearance and size are extra important.
It was extra temperamental before I got the feeder screwed in right but now I can fill it up to the brim without any trouble. I'd like a bigger hopper but the overall size of the unit is perfect so it's a non-issue. I'm really picky about design and am often let down when I actually get a product in the house. There's a round feeder that screws into the bottom of the hopper against the blades. Even still the single cup setting grinds more coffee than I actually want.
This leaves relatively little room for the beans, I had to re-fil it after four or five cups of coffee. Some reviewers have reported two problems: They have to shake the beans down into the grinder and the grind is pretty coarse. The feeder is secured to the bottom of the hopper by turning it to the left rather than the right (which is the intuitive "righty tighty.") I didn't pay close attention at first and didn't have the feeder actually hooked into the hopper for a few weeks. No matter how careful you are some coffee will get on the counter when you take the grind container out.
This is my first coffee grinder so I can't compare it with other models. I manually turn it off after I think I have enough so it works just fine but it would be nice if the single cup measurement was smaller. The hopper has a "max" line that's incredibly low, indicating beans really shouldn't be much higher than the main body of the unit. It seems to hold a little over 1/3rd of a pound of coffee when it's filled to the top. Once I screwed it in properly it worked perfectly.The finest setting is pretty small but probably not ideal for espresso (thought it would certainly work). It's not like it burps all over the place, and I'm not sure there's any way the problem could have been engineered away so it's not really a legitimate gripe. I was surprised that it actually looked better and is smaller than I expected.
All in all it's a great little device but I have no idea why they went with the non-standard rotation to attach the feeder. As a result I had to shake it to get the beans to feed down and the grind was pretty coarse on the lowest setting. The front of the unit has a dial for the amount of coffee you want to grind from a one to twelve cups. The container for the ground coffee doesn't exactly slide into the machine like butter but it's not too hard to get in there. I was really annoyed with it - thinking about sending it back even - until I got the feeder screwed in correctly.
So I determinedly checked out the insides through the hole left from the broken button and saw a freshly broken plastic surface where indeed, the button had once been attached (kudos to the cheap plastic parts, Krups). Called the "local" authorized repair center (about 80 miles away in Orlando) and they said they can look at it but if something inside was broken (such as the fitting that held the power button in place), they couldn't fix it because Krups doesn't make parts for it. Other than the fact that it spit out grinds from the tiny space between the unit and the catchment cup and made a mess on my counter, things were fine. The broken button is still rattling around inside, and there's only one screw I can find, quite hidden, on the bottom.
I guess this is a relatively common problem after reading some of the comments here. I never had a problem with grind settings, grind jams, power, etc. I also found the "master" power switch/button inside that the broken button hits when you press it to turn it on (just to the right of the blue light bulb), and by pressing it myself with a pen, it turned on like normal. Until then, at least it works and I saved myself the money of buying a new one. So I'd be paying shipping, plus the diagnostic fee, to potentially have them tell me that there was nothing they could do.
Other than the cosmetic defect, the unit works just fine, and the minor inconvenience of having to use a pen to turn it on isn't so bad that I'd want a new machine. Better believe I'll be looking at other models though, when that day comes. That was until this weekend when I hit the power button and it depressed all the way inside and popped off into the nether regions of the machine. This backs up the "specialty tool" the repair guy told me about that opens the unit up. Needless to say, I was very aggravated since it was in otherwise perfect working order, and seemed like SUCH a waste to dump it for one stupid little plastic part that broke that probably cost Krups about 50 cents to begin with.
There HAD to be a way around this without shelling out $60-100 for a new grinder, right. Anyway, it looks like if you unscrew it, the unit slides apart length-wise, so I might take it to Lowe's and see if they sell a micro-screwdriver that'll do the trick. Again, the grinder itself is perfect for this price range, and unless you're an over-the-top connoisseur, you be perfectly happy with the quality of the grinds.it's just that obviously Krups isn't putting much investment in its manufacturing.
It grinds the beans with good consistency(at least on the course setting). NO NOT BUY THIS IF YOU NEED A FINE GRIND. We've been using this for about 2 years. In fact, even on the course setting it wont grind our current coffee (Blue Cloud) at all. We'll still use it for fine beans. The timer seems to be accurate. It's never been able to grind anything as fine as what I would describe as "espresso".
I gave it three stars because it's been functional for most of our grinding needs. The positives: The grinder works pretty well for most beans when the grind is set to medium to course. If we made espresso, we would have returned this long ago. The negatives: As others have mentioned it binds up, especially with more oily roasts. With most coffee beans, it has no trouble on the medium-course setting. We're going to be supplementing it (that is, replacing it) with a cheap blade grinder for the oily beans. Mike S
I had been planning on buying a replacement when I pushed the ON button recently and it receded into the unit. I owned this grinder for about a year. It is now up-operational. The grinder never adequately provided a coarse enough grind for my french press and I constantly had to shake it to coax the beans down into the grinder. It was a lot of work. I hate to flame a product but this is definitely the biggest piece of junk small appliance I have owned. Time for a Capresso or something else, for sure.
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