Customer Reviews

Black & Decker ODC405 Spacemaker 10-Cup Stainless-Steel Thermal Carafe Coffeemaker

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(40)

 

 

I love spacesaver coffee makers that fit under a cabinet, as I really need to conserve counter space. But this coffeemaker is not the one! Probably the worst I have ever seen. The coffee is never hot (and I like *hot* coffee) and I can never pour a cup without setting it on top of a towel as no matter what a do coffee pours and streams all over the place. Ugh.

We use this coffee maker at the office, and it's just a complete disappointment. Before, we had the older version of the space maker, and it worked beautifully, unfortunatly it just quit working on us, after a few good years, so we had to get the new B&D version. It has been 2 years and three B&D's and no matter how many new ones we get, the darned thing just does not work right. You have to go back to it and push ON 15-20 times after the first time, no one likes watching coffee brew...And the coffee is never hot enough. I can't wait until a newer version comes out. Maybe that will have been fixed.

How could Black & Decker produce & then sell such a blatant insult to the senses. Ok yes setting the the clock timer function is very easy & the removable easily fillable water is great. Well now the bad good luck trying to just get a cup, pouring or even drippin (quick cup feature) you must completly remove the problematic lid to get any coffee out. Not so bad accept that the tiny minute threads that are groved (for pouring ha)make puttin the lid back on after removal (every cup) a three try challange even with patience & practice. (Sort of entertaining how anoying in the wee hours of morning a simple pour could be) Medium hot coffee when first brewed will be cold within the hour & the unremovable area where the water comes out into basket seems to like to harbor mold. (Tasty!!)
I cannot even fathom a design or even after that a quality check ever even happened, did B&D ever even try to get a cup of joe out of this unit, a complete reocuring nightmare every morning. I am so disapointed in this product that I will never buy another Black & Decker product again it's that bad. Must be hard to manufacture a coffee maker with a lid that screws on & off easily I guess.

Dear Black and Decker,
Several years ago, I think in 1997, I bought a Black and Decker Spacemaker coffee maker. I loved it every day. I may have had to replace the glass carafe one time due to an accident of clumsiness, but it was easy to find a new one, and I cleaned it out with white vinegar several times to keep it running well. It was great; it looked great; and it worked great.

One week before Christmas, almost a month ago, I woke up, flipped on the switch for coffee and nothing happened. The coffeemaker was broken.

No big deal. It worked very nicely for seven and a half years, and owed us nothing. I also have a Spacemaker can opener and a Spacemaker toaster oven and have been delighted with them too. I went to Walmart with the intent of finding an exact replacement of a good old friend.

What I found was a new Spacemaker. I installed it that day and have been sorry ever since.

What a disaster of design! I cannot imagine that your "customer friendliness" folks let this apparatus off the drawing board. And I'm not going to believe my wife and I and our holiday guests are the only people who find this thing aggravating and unfriendly.

Let me begin with the thermal carafe. Good concept. When the coffee was left too long on the old heated plate, it got a little rough. But it was always hot! And the automatic cutoff prevented it from creating a fire hazard. This carafe doesn't give you a hot cup of coffee for the first cup, much less after an hour. I have found that if I "preheat" the carafe by filling it with hot water from the tap while I prepare the filter and grind the beans, then I can get at least one or two cups of hot coffee. Problem solved - but inconvenient.

Now I have to tell you about the screwtop. Screwtop? What's that about? A plastic to plastic screwthread is not going to be easy no matter how well it is engineered. Now put it on a three and one half inch orifice and you are starting to get into real trouble. Add heat to expand and shrink the parts, and a rubber o-ring gasket to try to keep some warmth in the coffee, and you have created something that is truly a challenge. I will concede that for the agile twenty something set this contraption may not be a big deal, but I can assure you that for a large part of the population that has lost some manual dexterity and for those who never pay that much attention to details like well-seated screwthreads, this thing is a problem. Again, how did this ever get past your market testers?

Now let's assume that we are all like my twenty-three year old athlete son, and the screwtop is not a physical challenge. We manage to figure out that we have to turn the top so that the little white arrowhead, carefully concealed amongst the embossed marks in the plastic top (it is true, it says "pour"), is pointing toward the spout. Now our problems escalate again. Speaking only as a user of pouring devices, it seems to me that there is a comfortable angle to which one wants to lift the carafe in order to achieve poured coffee. With this carafe, and the arrow in the designated position, all you achieve is a dribble. Lifting the carafe to a higher angle, with the intent of achieving a more robust pour, soon results in coffee coming out the sides of the pouring lip, rolling back down the outside of the carafe, and making a mess of the countertop. I, my wife, and our holiday guests have spent three weeks trying different techniques (always beginning by making sure the screwthread is properly seated) because I did not want to believe that you could have sent this to market with this design defect. So to summarize so far, even if I am dextrous enough to manage the screwtop, I now have warm coffee on my countertop.

For three weeks, my wife has been asking me "what are you going to do about the coffee maker?" I have been stalling in hopes that I can become skilled at using what you all must have decided was improved technology. I thought maybe I was losing my edge.

Today, I gave up. I warmed the carafe with hot water while I ground the beans, I set the coffee brewing, and when it was maybe three-quarters of the way through brewing, I pulled the carafe to pour myself that first cup, confident that the cutoff feature would hold the drips for the ten seconds I needed to pour one cup. The coffee kept coming. The cutoff plug is not working. I'm going to guess another design flaw.

Of course, I threw away the box when I proudly installed the coffeemaker four weeks ago, and anyway, this is not something that needs to go back to the store. This is something you need to look at at the corporate level.

This seems like the perfect coffeemaker - everything looks great your setting your timer puting your water and coffee in your new coffeemaker feeling great about the purchase and thinking wow I finally found the perfect machine - you wake up the next morning to have that first cup of coffee from this wonderful machine and then it happens - dribbles of coffee are coming out - ok I will take off the lid I can live with that - I will just put it back on when I am through pouring my coffee - I thought, this is when it all sunk in this coffeemaker is not worth the aggravation I have had to deal with on a daily basis. Warm coffee and fights with the lid- I do not like confrontations so the last thing I want to do in the mornig is fight with my coffeemaker - if you have carpal tunnel or arthritis this pot will be a real pain- Hope this review helps.

The Black&Decker Spacemaker Coffee Maker was a disappointment because it does not keep the coffee warm by completely shutting off after brewing and the opening for the pour spout is not big enough to allow the coffee to but more than trickle into your cup. You will have to take the lid off to get it to pour at a normal rate.

Dear Black and Decker, concerning your space,saver coffe maker:
I bought a new one from Walmart for$48 plus dollars. The clock did not work (lite up) It was impossible to see it. I returned it and was given another one. This one did not lite up the clock either, but we tried it out any way, and presto the thing made coffee, coffee in the pot, coffee on the counter,that driped for over a hour from under the unit. Please note the pot was not over full, and the water was set at 6-cups. Now to get it installed I had to drill 4 holes in the bottom of our cabinet in order to install this wonderfull device that does indeed save space if nothing else. What a piece of junk this is, and that stainless pot takes a lot of patience just screw on the ridiculess top, then you have to almost un-screw the pot all the way to get the coffee out, to use as directed you only get a dribble when you align the top to the pour possition!
Now whomever designed this coffee maker should go work for your competion that alone would boost your sales.
What ever happened to the old type that had a real clock on the face of it and worked for almost ever, you know the one that had 2 outside brackets that held it up under the cabinet, and a glass carafee so that you could see how much coffee was in the pot, and not on the counter either???

We replaced our parents old ODC325 for Christmas with the new ODC425. Unfortunately the previously great design has been compromised in the new design to the point where unit is a nightmare to use, and our parents would like us to return the unit. We have to agree that their gripes are valid, and here is why:

Old design had glass carafe with flip lid. Easy to see coffee level, and easy to pour. New design has stainless steel carafe, so you can't see level. Also has poorly designed screw on lid that does not allow coffee to dispense at a practical rate. Lid is extremely hard to replace when removed also.

Old design had bright visible red LED display that was visible from any angle. New design went to mini LCD display (like on a small calculator) that is NOT backlit, and is nearly impossible to read from any angle let alone straight on. So you can't tell if the pot is on or off, you can't see coffee level, and it is a pain to dispense coffee.

Well, many words can describe the B&D. Saves space, easy to fill and keeps time. That's about all the good comments I have. The caraffe leaks all over the counter while pouring. I took the o-ring off of the lid to help reduce the spill. Didn't work. Finally bought a B&D glass pot to replce the caraffe, removed the gadget that allows mid brewing pour. Works great now! It brews cold coffee! Microwave now replaces warming function. C'mon B&D! Years of practice should result in perfect design. Is this outsourced to another country too?

After returning the first one and having the same result with Spacemaker number 2, I now know that every single one of these coffeemakers have these problems!

Most importantly, this obviously negligent design can create property damage at your home! In addition to all of the problems indicated in the many reviews that follow, the worst defect causes coffee to flood your kitchen during the brewing process. I used the 'sneak-a-peek' function to get that first cup. When putting the carafe back in, the brewing basket pushes out ever so slightly(such that you will not notice it unless you look closely). This causes the closure valve to misalign with the carafe and therefore stay closed. Coffee then floods out the top of the carafe. Unfortunately, I walked off without paying any attention. Ten minutes later I walked back into the kitchen to find coffee all over the countertop, floor, and even under the cabinets(where it couldn't even be dried out). I hope that my pergo floor doesn't swell up from the coffee that ran under the cabinets.

What a joke for a company the size of B&D to produce such a piece of junk.........and to keep producing it after so many people have been pointing out it's deficiencies for well over a year. I will not bother with B&D, but Lowes will hear about this intentional indifference on the part of B&D.

BTW, the product doesn't deserve a 1, but it wouldn't post without at least a 1.