On a daily basis we hear from readers who are having problems with their Keurig brewers. These issues range from the brewing of a partial cup of coffee, weird noises from the machine, to the Keurig not switching on at all. Sometimes we can help get the brewer back into action, depending on how serious the issue is and / or how willing the reader is to “get under the hood” and fix what is going wrong.
One of the things we have noticed since starting our first site keurigtroubleshooting.com and then migrating onto this site is the number of problems that arise for people around the two to three-year mark in ownership of their Keurig. The machines have often been working just fine up until this point and then for no clear reason they just stop. Either the machine won’t turn on at all or it will sit there looking pretty with lights on, but “no one home”.
We really feel the frustration for our readers in this situation. They are now well outside the Keurig one year warranty and so have very little recourse there and for most people the thought of going through all the hassle and cost of repair either by themselves or someone else is just not worth their time. So they either bite the bullet and go out and buy another Keurig brewer or they swap brands altogether and Keurig loose a good customer.
We find this situation unacceptable in either case; Keurig needs to step up for these many thousands of customer out there. Our site only receives a small percentage of people looking online for this help and then I’m sure we only receive emails for a small percentage of our visitors (looking at the site views compared to emails received). But from these numbers we know there is a serious underlying problem in the way Keurig designs the internals of their brewers. To have so many common faults from a machine that in the end is a large water heater is really not good enough.
We suspect that Keurig isn’t going to change their design, machine tooling, etc any time soon, but what they could do straight away is extend the warranty they offer on their brewers used in the home market. We are not asking for a lifetime warranty here, although that would be nice, but a warranty out to three years; so an extra two years on what they now offer. If Keurig are so confident about the quality of design and the components they use inside, then this shouldn’t be a significant financial nor operational problem for them. And this would be an excellent marketing position – we do not know of another coffee brewer where the manufacturer stands behind their machines with a warranty of this length.
And having now taken apart our K550 we purchased last year, we see they have actually had a significant redesign inside the machine with a much less cluttered and simple layout. And it is certainly much easier removing the outer and top casing. We’ll be having tutorial material on this later in they year.
Of course we know from our own experience Keurig customer service would become a lot busier with such a warranty. And this would cost the company money. Even though it has sales at over $4.5 billion, this move would impact on its future earnings. But this sort of move might then prompt a closer look at why these machines are failing and as a consequence three steps could be taken:
- provide a better internal design of their brewers whereby leakage of parts does not lead to failure of the whole machine (we’ll see how the new 2.0 series internal redesign helps with this);
- enable easier access and repair work to be carried out on their brewers. From the current setup it is clear they do not want people inside their machines attempting repair work; and
- provide better guidance on how to look after your Keurig and regular maintenance steps that can be taken. For example cleaning of needles and the descale process.
On this last point we are going to be looking into this a bit more in a future article as we are becoming more concerned about the impact the vinegar cleaning might be having on the internal brewer parts and how this might be leading to some of the failures we are hearing about from our readers. It is a cleaning process we recommend on our site, Cleaning Your Keurig Coffee Maker, and a process Keurig themselves suggest is carried out. However we suspect that the acetic acid properties of the vinegar might actually be damaging the solenoids and pumps. There days we are suggesting people use a product we now use in all of our coffee makers, and that is cleaning tablets marketed by Bosch.
Thank you for reading our article today. As always we would love to hear from you with either feedback or questions. Drop a comment below or send us an email, using our Contact Us page.