UPDATE: My second blender has had a failure of the carafe -- the drive coupling on the base actually fell completely off. Waring's warranty options are "send it to Connecticut" or drive 80 miles to the service center. No replacement carafe, even at a discount. I find this unacceptable.
This is a great blender, with a powerful motor that will easily crush ice. I'm actually on my second one which my wife and I use every daily to make fruit smoothies with ice and frozen fruit (I use frozen strawberries which are probably harder than ice cubes). It's dead simple to operate, with a basic toggle switch to control the motor -- high/low/off are the only options, which means no fancy digital controls to fail.
I have two criticisms of this blender, though. One, the jar isn't completely dishwasher safe. On our first blender, we found that small cracks developed in the base, which caused ever so slight leaking, after about a dozen or so trips through the dishwasher. I fixed most of that with a coating of plastic epoxy on the underside. Long-term, this made the base where the blender sits get exposed to moisture/residue and made it hard to clean. Even though the current jar is durable, glass would be truly dishwasher safe, wouldn't crack and wouldn't ever leak.
On our blender, the long-term exposure to moisture at the base I think caused its premature failure. The *motor* didn't fail, but the linkage between the drive coupling and the motor corroded, resulting in the linkage stripping and no longer being capable of blending even a pitcher of water.
My second criticism isn't that so much (although I suspect no stainless steel drive components were used) but that there was *no* documentation I could find on how to remove the top drive coupling to disassemble the base and replace the corroded parts. They even sell replacement drive coupling for the base, but I'll be darned if I could figure out how to remove it. So basically I had to toss a blender that probably could have been easily fixed.
My first one had a life span of about 6-7 years, which while not great, isn't awful considering the heavy use, and I didn't hesitate to buy another one versus the vastly more expensive and complicated VitaMix and Blendtecs.
Customers also viewed these products
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Videos
Page 1 of 1Start OverPage 1 of 1
Videos for this product
1:29
Click to play video
Waring HPB300 MegaMix Commercial Blender, Brushed Steel
Merchant Video
