Automatic Coffee Maker
How Does an Automatic Coffee Maker Work?
An automatic coffee maker might be the busy person’s best friend. It makes your coffee for you the exact way you want it, when you want it and it doesn’t give you any lip about not brushing your hair. Like a janitor, you know what it does is important but you don’t know how it does it. This is a good chance to find out how your coffee maker gets around to making your coffee.
While some models have nifty bells and whistles, most coffee makers have the same parts running inside and working in concert to give you that fresh cup of coffee. When you open up your coffee maker, there are three things that should immediately jump at you: the reservoir, the shower head and the heating element.
The reservoir holds the water, as the name suggests. At the bottom of most reservoirs is a hole. A tube usually leads from the bottom of the reservoir to the drip area. The shower head then takes it from there and distributes the water among the coffee grounds. Your automatic coffee maker might not have this; instead, it may have a plastic, perforated disc which is normally termed the drip area, which spreads out the water.
The heating element is what brings it all together, which is usually made of two parts – a resistive heater and a water tube. Without this, you’d end up with water that ran through some coffee grinds. The first part is also called a resistive heating element, which only sounds complicated. It’s basically a coiled wire, like those that you’d find in electric toasters and it gets hot when electricity is introduced. It performs two obvious functions – heating the water and keeping it warm.
Making the coffee itself sounds complicated as well. The water that you put into your automatic coffee maker first goes into the reservoir, which then goes through the tube that is part of the heating element. Switching the machine on powers the resistive heating element, boiling the water and pushing the water up and out of the shower head or through the drip area. That boiling water then flows and mixes with the ground coffee beans that you hopefully put in there two, taking with it coffee oils or caffeol. The end result is a nice, piping hot cup of coffee.
While this might not allow you to build your very own coffee maker, it might give you more appreciation for that cup of coffee you drink every morning. Your automatic coffee maker does a lot for you and can really set the tone for your day, with more advanced models even allowing you to tune the coffee it makes. It truly is a great part of the modern age.