It’s time for another frugal
win of the week (FWOTW) post! We have
owned a Keurig coffee brewing machine for over 5 years and it’s never let us
down – until 2 days ago when it decided to stop brewing hot water and coffee!
While K-cup Pods are
extremely convenient to use, we figured out a long time ago that purchasing
K-cup Pods was a waste of money. The
tiny amount of coffee used in each K-cup costs the equivalent of $40 per
pound! That’s over 7 times the cost of the
delicious ground coffee we get at Aldi.
K-cups are also bad for the environment since most people do not take
the time to disassemble the K-cup to properly recycle it (the foil lid needs to
be removed and the coffee grounds emptied).
So why do we continue to use
our Keurig machine? While the Keurig is
sort of a glorified hot water dispenser, it’s still extremely convenient to
use. We purchase ground coffee at Aldi
and fill our reusable K-cups to brew
coffee at home. The reusable K-cups are
eco friendly and easily washable. We can
fill any type of coffee grounds we like into the cups and enjoy easy to prepare
coffee at home.
Back to the story. When our Keurig machine stopped brewing
coffee, my first thought was: “we’ve had
5 good years with these machine and it’s time to throw it away!” My next thought was: “can I fix this myself?”
A quick Google search on “Keurig not brewing coffee” took me to a
few good blogs on how to troubleshoot our device. The most common reasons for a Keurig not
brewing include: clogged needle, need to descale, air bubble, clogging of water
line, or improperly sealed parts.
I have to admit, I had no
idea we were supposed to descale our Keurig every 3-6 months from calcium
buildup! Keurig has instructions on how
to use their descaling
product but I learned that we could also descale our Keurig with white
distilled vinegar we had in our pantry.
Basically you fill the water reservoir halfway with vinegar and keep
running the machine until the reservoir is emptied. Then you run the machine with water only to
flush out any remaining vinegar.
After descaling our machine,
I cleaned out the needle with a paperclip and cleaned out the pipes by blowing
them clear with a straw. Voila: our
Keurig was running smooth as new again!
Bonus FWOTW: we did not do
any Black Friday shopping this year since we weren’t interested in anything. Remember that saving 30% off something you
don’t need isn’t really saving money.