tompoland But I note that your main point, I think, which is that you not are standing in judgement of naive purchases as such, but more with ignoramuses claiming to have some well researched basis for their kit when in fact they have none. I can only imagine how eyeball-roll-inducing that must be for someone with your acknowledged depth and breadth of experience.
I absolutely don’t judge those who purchase these devices in good faith…I feel saddened and peturbed by the direction the coffee world of influencers and many manufacturers have taken. It’s more about marketing and money than about the customers now. I do think those burrs should not have been properly tested by customers…if that makes sense.
At WOC in Milan May 2022, in the roasters village every single stand had a Eurka Grinder (white), and there were hundreds of them. Either Eureka grinders are so good everyone’s buying them (and so should you), or, Eureka gave every one of them a grinder?
The ARCO 2 in 1 grinder was something I thought incredibly noisy at that same show, I even commented on it on the video. I videoed it because it was getting a lot of influencer hype at the time. I hope that grinder has shaped up well and owners are really pleased….but we’re not hearing a lot from them?
Just use any plug that measures watts consumption, it doesn’t matter if it’s super accurate as long as you use the same one and if you use 2, check them against each other with a standard load. They are inexpensive and are useful in dispelling certain myths.
- flat burrs need more power to turn than conicals
- that motor isn’t powerful enough
etc..
More importantly it is an indication of work done per unit time. Unfortunately they don’t always sample frequently enough to be really good for this, but it’s an indication. I use a high sample rate multimeter to measure amps consumed for that…but these cheap power meters help you get an idea.
This is important because the power curve of a grinder is very important and why I came up with the flow control disk for the Niche…or pushed it might be more accurate as I got the idea from what Eureka had done. They did something for anti-popcorning…mine was purely for flow control anti-popcorning being a side benefit.
You want a power curve more like the one on the right, for best grind quality. This applies to any grinder…It concentrates the distribution of particles within the particle distribution pattern of the grinder. The width of that possible particle distribution doesn’t change, but the pattern of coffee within it does.
It’s also the reason hand grinders work so well as the grinding effort tends to be more linear because it’s power limited (by the human effort available).