Why does distilled water not work in a keurig machine?
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Consuming distilled, or de-ionized, water is not great for your body. This may sound weird, and many people will say “I’ve done it and I felt fine!”, but your body isn’t used to drinking distilled water. Water with no ions at all will actually hurt your cells by pulling salts and other important compounds OUT OF your cells! This is why sports drink companies talk about electrolytes and how important they are for hydration
The only “Keurig machine” i can find are coffee makers.
I assume you mean something different because coffee makers work fine with distilled water.
Allthough obviously the coffee will taste different from when you use regular tap or spring water.
Sounds like the system requires the minerals in water to act as a switch. Electricity can’t conduct through distilled water so the machine has no way of knowing if there is water or not. I imagine the heating element switches off once water reaches a certain point but since the water is nonconductive it doesnt detect it and the heating element can burnout or create too much pressure inside the machine. I could see how that would destroy the machine pretty quickly.
Coffee makers rely on boiling water to pump the water by gravity. Basically, a column of boiling water containing bubbles is lighter than solid water, so the water in the column can go higher than the water level. This allows it to act like a fountain.
In order for the pumping effect to work properly, there has to be smooth, even boiling.
A problem can occur with very pure liquids and very clean surfaces. Bubbles tend to form more easily on impurities. In pure water, it is difficult for bubbles to form. This allows the water to become superheated (heated to more than the boiling point but without boiling). When a bubble suddenly does form, you can get a chain reaction where bubbles start forming on bubbles, leading to a sudden explosion of boiling which can spray water everywhere. This sudden and erratic boiling is called “bumping”. It doesn’t always happen, but it can happen and be a problem, so it’s best avoided as far as practical.
By using tap water, it is much less likely that you get this “bumping” and instead get smooth boiling which causes a smooth supply of water to the coffee.
It’s the same reason why distilled water is not recommended for use in clothes irons. You want a steady supply of steam. Bumping boiling risks sudden spurts. The minerals in tap water help stop this happening.
I specialize in restaurant dispensed beverages. On top of the water sensing circuits others have mentioned, distilled water should have a Total Disolved Solid (TDS) of less than 5ppm. The problem with this is that a low TDS results in the coffee bean flavor being over extracted, resulting in a very bitter tasting coffee. Go the other direction with too high TDS and you will get a very weak coffee. A TDS of 100-200ppm most people would consider the ideal range. However coffee taste is VERY subjective so it may vary depending on which coffee company you take advice from. There are many factors of coffee flavor, TDS is only one of them.
If you really insist on using distilled water in the keurig, put a shake or two of salt in the water (obviously this would “un-distill” the water), and it will detect the water.
Fun fact: in the early days, McDonald’s used Reverse Osmosis (RO) water for their pre-chiller water bath. Since the water out of an RO system typically will have a low TDS, this would sometimes cause problems with the water level probes. So as a workaround, people would put bags of salt in the water bath. Since the pre chiller is made of metal, there were a lot of corrosion problems. That is when they switched to using “Blended-RO” (a mix of cartridge filtered and RO water). This worked out anyways, as RO water is slow and McDonald’s business would soon outgrow the RO systems ability to keep up.
Additionally, McDonald’s uses a remineralizer on the coffee and espresso water lines. This was to further add minerals to the coffee water to increase TDS and improve flavor.
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