Inside a Coffee Maker

If you take off the top of the coffee maker, you find three things:

The view inside the top of the coffee maker

• There is a little bucket that holds the water when you pour it into the pot at the start of the coffee-making cycle (on the right in the picture above). There is a hole in the bottom of the bucket, and its role will become obvious in a moment.

• There is a black tube that carries the hot water to the drip area.

• There is the drip area (on the left-hand side of this picture). Water arrives here from the black hot-water tube and simply falls through the holes into the coffee grounds.

Looking at this picture, you get your first impression that this isn't a high-tech device. If you take the bottom off the coffee maker, here is what you will find:

The view inside the bottom of the coffee maker

The depression on the right-hand side of this figure is the bottom of the bucket. The orange tube in the center is the hot-water tube (it connects to the black tube that we saw in the previous picture). The other orange tube picks up cold water from the hole in the bucket. You can also see the power cord coming in as well as the switch that turns the coffee maker on and off.

The on-off switch

The heating element is an aluminum extrusion with two parts: a resistive heating element and a tube for water to flow through, like this:

The resistive heating element and the aluminum tube to heat the water