Actually, the element has crapped out. It happened a while ago. I put the grounds and water in it, hit the switch, and it wasn’t doing anything nearly thirty minutes later. We had a french press, so I decided to worry about it later and default onto our other alternative.
Notice that I said “had” in referring to the french press. Doing dishes the other morning, it fell out of the strainer where I had put it to dry. I heard it hit the counter when I turned away. It was nice to pretend that I didn’t hear it crack, but it was neatly held together in three various pieces by the metal bindings around it.
This morning, I got a screw driver and pulled apart the coffee maker to see what I could find out. Aside from being amazed at how very little goes into the technology of our particular maker, some burnt spots on the wiring under the element was enough to alert me to potential problems. Still, I tried it out to see if it worked anyway. Sure enough, the element didn’t even get lukewarm. I could try to replace the part, but it’s much easier to just say, “it broke!”
Rebecca took the ghetto engineering up a notch after that. Boiled water, a strainer, and a coffee filter stuffed inside of that, we had some tediously made, delicious coffee. It worked fairly well, but the waiting is a little painful.
A second attempt proved a little better. Take away the paper filter from before and the process was much quicker. There was a little bit of grit, but not too bad. A second straining proved to make it just right in terms of consistency.
We just have to replace either of the two broken appliances, but this works when in a pinch. I Googled various other possibilities, but Rebecca took to the experiment undaunted. We could just have done tea instead, but that would have been boring.