Last Updated on October 4, 2021 by John Moretti
Making coffee with hard water can be a pain, but with these great coffee makers, it doesn’t have to be. Save time and money by not needing to purchase distilled water to use in your coffee.
I’ve compiled a list for you of the best coffee makers for hard water, in order of best to worst. Read on to find the perfect one for you!
1. Cuisinart DCC1150BK Classic Thermal Coffee Maker
In order to understand why this coffee maker is fantastic for hard water, we have to understand why there’s a need for coffee makers that work well with hard water in the first place.
Hard water is water that has a large amount of calcium or magnesium in it. This is usually fine for most people to drink, but it can cause serious damage to all sorts of hardware from sinks and plumbing to coffee makers.
If your coffee maker isn’t constantly kept clean, hard water will cause a build-up of limescale in the device that can eventually cause overflowing, decreased heating strength, and other adverse effects. If left unchecked for long enough, hard water can break your coffee maker completely.
This is what makes the Cuisinart DCC1150BK great for people who want to use hard water for their coffee. The DCC1150BK has an automatic cleaning system that makes it so that you don’t need to do nearly as much work to maintain it.
But this isn’t the only advantage that the DCC1150BK has over the competition! It’s also a traditional coffee maker that can make a large amount of coffee at a time and is great at keeping a pot of coffee hot for a long period of time.
Or alternatively, you can use its “brew pause” function to finish one serving of coffee extra quickly and be on your way. With flexibility on its side, the DCC1150BK really is a classic.
2. Chulux Single Serve Coffee Maker
Single-serve coffee makers are usually pretty bad for hard water because they clog easily. This goes for the vast majority of one-cup coffee makers, since their narrower openings are easy to fill up with limescale.
The Chulux single-serve is different because of its self-cleaning feature that specifically targets limescale. This allows it to operate using hard water for much longer than the average single-serve coffee maker. You could even keep using it perpetually if you maintain it well.
This is a great choice if you only need to make one cup of coffee in the morning, or if you need to bring your coffee maker out with you when you travel. Because it’s small and portable, it’s easy to store and can work even if you go somewhere with poor water quality.
The most exciting thing about the Chulux single-serve is that it’s less than fifty dollars. That price blows everything else on this list out of the water! Of course, this choice still might not be the one for you if you aren’t the only one in your home who needs their morning coffee.
3. Braun KF6050WH Brewsence Drip Coffee Maker
This high-tech coffee machine is a great option for coffee lovers who want to unharden the hard water before they drink it. The Braun KF6060WH Brewsence Drip Coffee Maker (BKBDCM) has a built-in filter that gets rid of most of the limescale before it even comes in contact with the coffee, solving some of the biggest problems with using hard water before they even become problems.
Not only does the BKBDCM filter out most of the bad stuff, but it also has an auto-clean feature that makes it so whatever does get in won’t be ruining your coffee production experience, plus it can be adjusted based on your water’s hardness levels.
It also has the same brew pause function as the Cuisinart coffee maker, plus flexible settings that let you brew however much coffee you need.
The only problem with the BKBDCM is that it has a hard time keeping the coffee warm after it’s already been poured. Otherwise, it’s one of the best options specifically for brewing coffee using hard water, owing to its being designed to be used with hard water.
It’s relatively cheap too, costing less than a hundred dollars on Amazon. It’s generally a great option!
4. Mr. Coffee 31160392 Easy Measure Cup Programmable Coffee Maker
This under $100 coffee maker is another one that has great equipment for preventing limescale buildup. In this case, it’s a top-of-the-line filter that can get almost all of the chlorine and other hard water chemicals out of the water before they even become a problem!
The only negative with the Mr.Coffee 31160392 Easy Measure Cup Programmable Coffee Maker (MC3EMCPCM) is that it has no auto-clean feature, meaning that if the filter is ever anything less than 100% effective, you run the risk of quickly damaging your coffee maker unless you spend the effort cleaning and de-scaling it.
Despite this, the MC3EMPCPCM is a fantastic choice at a budget price that is one of the only coffeemakers that can actually get the hard water taste out of your coffee. This is definitely one of the better choices that you can take advantage of.
5. Nespresso Vertuo Plus Coffee and Espresso Maker Bundle By De’Longhi
Nespresso is another one-serve machine that has an auto-clean feature. This coffee maker has its own brand of coffee capsules. The amazing thing about the Nespresso Vertuo Plus Coffee and Espresso Maker Bundle by De’Longhi is that it can actually read the barcodes on the capsules and change its settings accordingly, making it oh so gloriously low-effort to make great coffee!
The reason that this coffee maker is great for hard water is because of its auto-descaling feature. When the machine detects a significant amount of limescale in its machinery, it simply turns on its descaler and that’s that! You don’t really need to do anything to help.
The only two downsides to this coffee maker are the price and its tendency to leak. It’s over double the price of number three on this list, and it’s much smaller. It makes up for this by also being able to prepare espresso, which most of the other machines on this list can’t do at all.
All of this combines to make this coffee maker one of the better machines when it comes to hard water areas. You have a number of great options to keep the machine healthy and plenty of different ways to prepare your coffee. Just keep an eye out for coffee stains nearby, or you might end up with a bigger problem than you started with.
6. HAMSWAN Drip Coffee Machine AD-103
This drip coffee maker is designed to be easy to clean, which is how it gets ahead of its competitors when it comes to taking on hard water on a regular basis. Because of this, it isn’t hard to maintain the rigor that hard water demands from you.
This coffee maker also lacks a reservoir, which means that the same water you put in at the beginning of the brewing process is the water that comes out when it’s all over!
It can brew ten cups of coffee at a time, which makes it great for families or office spaces that need ten cups of coffee all at once. It’s also fairly compact, which allows it to fit easily on crowded counters. Combined with the device’s ease of use, this is generally a great coffee maker!
It does have a few problems, however, as its filter tends to overfill with coffee grinds and make the lid difficult to open and clean. There are also reports of it shutting off after only a few uses, but these seem to be small-scale problems with a minority of units. Maybe try getting a warranty on this one if it’s offered?
This coffee maker is a great option if space is a challenge in your home, your store offers a warranty, and you have a lot of people who want coffee but can’t operate complicated machines. Hey, no shame there!
7. AmazonBasics Drip Coffee Maker
The AmazonBasics Drip Coffee Maker is relatively cheap and fairly large. While it doesn’t have the fancy technology to keep up with the more specialized coffee makers on this list, it does have the advantage of not needing to be cleaned very often (only once every eight weeks or so.)
It also has fairly good reviews on Amazon, which bodes well for longevity. The bummer is that since it doesn’t auto-clean, if you live in an area with hard water, you will need to be cleaning out the inside of the machine to get it to last its best possible time.
As the name suggests, this is a basic drip coffee maker with no frills and no gadgets. It just turns out that all of the frills in the world won’t save you from hard water if your coffee maker isn’t designed to handle it.
8. Hamilton Beach (49950C) Coffee Maker
There’s no particular reason that this coffee maker is better than any other for hard water, but it does have the flexibility to make either one cup or twelve cups at a time. Generally, flexibility is the name of the game with this device, but it certainly loses some of this flexibility when used with hard water.
The problem is that it doesn’t have any kind of auto-cleaning feature, meaning that if you actually use the single-serve function on this machine with hard water, there’s a good chance that if you don’t clean it thoroughly afterward, your nice new coffee machine might not last very long.
However, both of the two modes have different reservoirs, meaning that you can put hard water in the big one and distilled in the other one and neither should be contaminated with the other. Of course, you could also just get a coffee maker that’s designed to deal with limescale buildup. It would be less work and it might even be cheaper.
This machine also struggles to keep the coffee warm after it’s been poured. The single-cup side has issues as well, brewing surprisingly slowly for such a small amount of coffee. All in all, not an exceptional choice if you plan on using hard water, but an acceptable one.
9. BUNN BX Speed Brew Classic 10-Cup Coffee Maker
This coffee maker is easy to use and brings us to the third problem that comes with using hard water for your coffee: taste! Coffee tastes differently depending on what water you use when you’re making it. The extra chemicals in the water can end up binding to the coffee and causing a distinctly bad flavor.
The BUNN BX Speed Brew Classic 10-Cup Coffee Maker (BBSBC10CCM) doesn’t do anything to solve this or any of the other problems associated with hard water, but it does have a drip coffee function that you can use to make the bitterest black coffee imaginable to drown out the taste of not being willing to buy a water filter.
It does have some upsides, however, as it is fantastic at keeping your coffee warm. It is also, as the name would suggest, very fast at making coffee. Plus it’s simple to use, which is a big plus if somebody in your life is technologically challenged.
As for its longevity, the BBSBC10CCM is difficult to clean, requires heavy maintenance, and can break easily if not given the attention it wants. Fortunately, it comes with a three-year warranty, so if it breaks, you can just get a new one and do the whole dance over again.
The reason that this coffee maker is on the list is that it is a drip coffee maker that can make a pretty good amount of coffee, and among other ordinary coffee makers this does make it relatively good if you’re using hard water. Unfortunately, it will take a lot of effort to keep clean and there’s a good chance even if you do put the effort in, it will still break.
