Hamilton Beach Smart Coffee Maker

I was very excited to try this coffeemaker out since I have had great results with this brand in the past. One of my wife's favorite movies of all time is "Smart House" so it is one of my life's goals to get her home as close to that one as possible, minus the movie results, lol. Right out of the box I was impressed with how well they secured everything. In fact, it is secured so well that you will want to take care using it for the first time as there are strips of tape on the front and back. Be especially mindful of the ones on the left and right of the coffee filter door as it could pose undue stress on it if the tape is not removed prior to opening. The coffee maker has an excellent low profile that is narrow as well. (7.5 inches across and 13.5 inches tall.) This does not take up a lot of your space yet still delivers a perfect 12 cup pot of coffee! One of the features that I love the most is how EVERYTHING can be done from the front! You can add water and the coffee grounds without having to slide the entire coffeemaker out from under the cabinets. Also, you don't have to worry about getting burned when you open either door while the pot is brewing or in operation in any way since there are no water sprays near these doors! Best of all, my reuseable coffee filter fits this model perfectly so no filters will have to be purchased. Adding water is easy now since the front flap opens up allowing you to add water from the left or the right side of the coffeemaker. This is great if you plan to use a sink sprayer to add water, just be mindful of the shallow reservoir opening and use low pressure. You can also add water with the carafe without spilling it all over the counter thanks to their wonderful design that did not drip ONE drop when adding water! As for the Alexa integration, this went perfectly without a single snag once I made one important change to my network. Despite it allowing you to manually input your network information if your SSID is hidden like mine is, you will have to UN-hide it while you set up the app. Once it connects and adds it to the Alexa control, you can re-hide your SSID. Also, to make setting up your coffeemaker easier, allow access to your camera on the cell phone so that you can just scan the convenient QR code on the back. This speeds up Alexa integration and makes it a lot easier for you. Once Alexa was set up, everything worked like a dream! The clock instantly is set to the correct time and she went right to work brewing me a pot of coffee on my command! (She even politely asked me "Did you mean coffeemaker?" when I incorrectly said "coffee pot.") Brewing a pot of coffee from the moment my command was acknowledged to full pot was exactly 11 minutes and 55 seconds using 3 full scoops of coffee from a typical coffee scoop. In a 62 degree (F) room, the coffee was 179 degrees (F). Best of all, the coffee strength was set to regular and throughout the entire brewing process, the coffee looked full-bodied and not weak at all so I could have interrupted the process and poured myself a good tasting full strength cup of coffee. Also, when brewing a second time I did interrupt it and am happy to report that only one drop continued out before the spring-loaded bottom closed it back. I am so excited about this wonderful coffeemaker. The coffee tastes amazing and is brewed at a good enough temperature to really bring out the excellent flavor in more expensive coffees as well as even conventional brands. I highly recommend this outstanding coffeemaker. It looks like they did a wonderful job thinking of everything with this and I like how they even leave the door open for more features in the future. P.S. Setting up the Alexa app is easy! -From Alexa app, tap the menu button on the top left and choose "Routines." -Then tap the plus sign on the top right to add a new routine. -From here you can name your routine, tell it when the routine should happen and add an action. For the "When" I chose "Schedule" and picked a certain time-you can even set a different routine for weekends and weekdays, particular days, if you plan to sleep in, etc. -Then you just "Add Action." Tap the plus and select "Smart Home", then "All Devices" then "Coffee Maker." You can set the Power as well as the Brew Strength from here. -That's it! You did it! Welcome to the future! (Make sure the "Ready to Brew" button is pushed before you go to sleep!) Technical info: The bottom says 950W. While brewing, it pulled a pretty constant 7.8 amps that only got close to 8 once or twice and around 962W. Hope this has helped you! Update 1/5/21: After faithfully serving us coffee for about a year, the display started getting glitchy and flickering. Soon after we no longer could see any of the display and it would not power on at all. The red light comes on when we manually press the power button but it doesn't do anything. Sadly it only lasted a year but it may be due to how sloppy I am with adding water. I used my kitchen sprayer to add the water before brewing and it is entirely possible that I got water where it wasn't supposed to be. At any rate we will now be looking for a different coffeemaker to try. This one served us very well until the end.