It’s a Hamilton Beach; roughly a year old. For the past couple weeks, it’s brewed all the water, but I was only getting like 3/4 the volume compared to what I was putting in there. I read mineral deposits will cause more rapid evaporation and to clean the pot with vinegar. I did so. Now, anytime I brew a cup of coffee, only half the water peculates! There’s still a ton of water left inside the machine!!
Any ideas?
Thanks!!
I don’t know the coffee pot answer, but you made me look up “peculate” 
I hate appliances that steal from you.
Some folks say that citric acid works better than vinegar. I haven’t tried either one so I can’t say one way or the other.
I don’t know anything about your specific coffee maker, but most of them are fairly simple in design. One of the keys to the way they work is a check valve. If there is something wrong with this valve, you end up with symptoms basically like you describe. A lot of the water doesn’t end up going where it is supposed to go. A lot of times the check valve doesn’t seal properly because of build-up inside the machine. This is where your vinegar trick helps. It (ideally) dissolves the gunk and lets the check valve work properly. It could be that you’ve got some stubborn gunk, or maybe a bigger piece of scale broke off during the cleaning and is preventing the valve from closing properly, or something like that.
If you’re handy with a screwdriver (and your machine is reasonably easy to take apart), you can pop it open and suck and blow on the hose leading to the check valve. You should be able to blow into it but it should close and prevent air flow when you try to suck air back out of it. If it doesn’t do that, then the problem is with the valve.
Another potential problem is the thermal safety sensor on the heating element. This shuts off the heating element to prevent it from overheating and possibly causing damage to the coffee maker or potentially even a fire. If the thermal sensor is failing, it could be shutting off at a much lower temperature, preventing the machine from boiling all of the water.
Valve problems are by far the most common.
Some coffeemakers have a setting for how many cups you want to brew. Is it possible yours has this and it got changed?
Some of the water is being absorbed with the grounds. Have you run a pot through without any coffee grounds to see how much comes out?
How exactly did you do this?
The proper procedure is to fill the cold water reservoir with vinegar & let it sit a few minutes. Then turn the heater on to “brew” the vinegar (without any coffee grounds or filter of course).
Repeat this step 2 or 3 times using fresh vinegar each time. Then “brew” 2 or 3 cycles of clean water the same way to rinse away any traces of vinegar.
The instructions for my pot are to run the brew cycle for a minute, then let the pot sit for ten minutes, then run the brew cycle to completion.
Wow, I’ve never butchered a word like that in my life. :smack:
Thanks for pointing that out. Now I can go hide in shame…
I will play handyman. With it functioning the way it currently does, it’s pretty much useless so I wouldn’t have much to lose. Thanks.
I had a Cuisinart machine do this to me after about 6 months of use. Called the help line and was told it was a problem with the machine. It was developing an air bubble while brewing the coffee and this was causing the machine to over heat and shut off. In this case it was a design flaw. They sent me a new machine and told me to throw out the old one. Still using that coffee maker 3 years later.