mercury!
Only one review on Amazon,
2.0 out of 5 stars Looked amazing, but disappointing when used January 26, 2013
By Matt Wahl
Amazon Verified Purchase
Let’s start with the good. The look is wonderful. I was expecting it to be brushed metal (not from having actually read the specs of it or anything) but that’s what it looks like in the picture. So I was suprised to find it entirely made of plastic, but that one is on me. The point is, I fell in love with the looks of it. And it still delivers. This is nice squat carafe and looks awesome.
The “clever spout indicator” or whatever they use to describe it is just an aluminum dot on the top of the plug that when turned to face the spout means it is able to pour. There is no button or plunger and to me that is fine–I like simplistic design as there should be less to go wrong. When looking at it in person you might think that the spout might have a tendency to drip or be difficult to stop the pour accurately, but that proved to not be an issue. The stream is thin but precise and comes to an abrupt stop when you tilt it back up from a pour. It worked better than I thought it would.
Now I’ll go into why I had to return this. The carafe I was trying to replace was a nothing fancy but functional version you can buy at a popular mall store for about $30. I came to be annoyed by the way that water would collect inside the topper and be difficult to fully drain out. The fact that this item has a one-piece top without any openings or plungers should be a postive–however if you should drop it in a sink when cleaning up, water will find a way into its hollow core and you can’t get it out. It won’t drip out no matter if you shake it or leave it on a dish rack overnight. I did find that the next time I used it for coffee, the heat forced the trapped water out. But alas the only place for it to go is to drip out into your coffee as you pour yourself a drink. Lesson learned–never submerge the topper.
But the tipping point for me was the way base was assembled. When I first used this to serve coffee I was surpised by a mysterious leak of coffee from the base of the unit. I couldn’t figure out at first, but that’s when I came to realize that the jug is just a plastic shell covering a separate silvery thermal insulated vessel inside. The plastic shell unscrews at the base, leaving the top half from a dish-shaped bottom plate. In the middle of the bottom plate is a round plug that screws into the center. I figured out that the purpose of the round plug is to hold the silver carafe up against the neck of the top part of the jug. The carafe itself is not screwed into the jug, it just sits in place and is pressed up against the neck. My unit was apparently a bit loose and so coffee was pouring out the spout but also through the gap in the seal and into the bottom where it then leaked out the sides and area around the plug. So I figured out how to separate the bottom, washed up and put back together and secured the plug so that the inner vessel didn’t move.
That should have solved everything, but alas that wasn’t enough. I suppose that one of the reasons the designers chose not to make the thermal innards screw into the outer shell was that with the addition of hot liquids a decent pressure can build up. I was presented with this upon my next use of the carafe after making sure that everything was tight and secure—the bottom forcibly blew off to release the pressure and coffee flowed onto the counter. Upon my third cleanup of the unit I found that there are also some rubber gaskets in the construction, as they were now floating in my sink. One of them fits onto the lip of the inner vessel and is easy to figure out, but the other goes somewhere inside the top portion, from the bottom, but who knows how it goes back on and if you’ve even fixed it properly.
It was at this point that I realized it was too much hassle for the aesthetics.
But people are actually buying these jugs & mugs!!!
Synthahol Sunday.