Best Plumbed Coffee Makers (With Water Lines): 5 Options To Consider

We all love coffee. Sometimes, there are too many of us that love coffee in one spot, and as a result it becomes a hassle to keep refilling the coffee maker with water every so often. The solution is to get a plumbed coffee maker that has a water line connection!

What are plumbed coffee makers?

Simply put, plumbed coffee makers are coffee makers that have a direct connection to your water line. Now, instead of having to fill up the coffee maker manually, the water line constantly feeds it and keeps it topped up.

If you have a lot of people drinking coffee in one go, it’s useful to have a plumbed coffee maker so you don’t have to keep topping up.

You’ll find plumbed coffee makers in coffee shops and restaurants, as you rarely see anyone using a jug of water to top up their coffee machines!

You could certainly have one at home if you want the convenience – much like plumbed refrigerators.

However, places where plumbed coffee makers really shine are:

Offices

In office spaces, coffee makers with water lines are extremely useful because there’s so many people going to grab coffee and this happens throughout the day.

Instead of running around with water – which is time consuming and can get messy really fast – you can just have a coffee maker that gets a regular supply of water from a direct connection.

Restaurants

If you own a restaurant, you can opt for a coffee maker with a water line as you’ll need to keep up with a steady stream of orders and you want to be as efficient as possible.

Community centers

Community centers also cater to a lot of people at once and if you have a coffee machine here you’ll want a plumbed one for the same reasons as office spaces and restaurants.

Keurig coffee maker with water line

Without a doubt, the best coffee maker with a water line is a Keurig. That’s because they are a great fit for offices and community centers.

Some people(including me sometimes) hate on Keurig for kind of destroying what it means to brew coffee, but there’s no arguing that Keurig coffee makers are incredibly convenient and easy to clean.

For that reason, our favorite kind of plumbed coffee maker is the Keurig B150.

In office, commercial, and community center settings, you want to be able to let people brew coffee as they come and go without having to mess with grounds and grinding as much as possible.

Keurig K-Cups are very easy to use and clean up, and there’s hardly any need to even wipe the machine down after one use for the next person. Plus, they come in huge varieties and sampler packs so there will be something for everyone.

Keurig K150P: Best Keurig coffee maker with water line

The Keurig K150P is an ideal plumbed coffee maker for offices because of its versatility and convenience.

It is capable of brewing a variety of sizes, from 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12 ounces of coffee in a single serving. A full color touch screen lets you control the various options in your brew(such as the temperature, which you can vary by 10 degrees or so), and there is an auto on-off for saving power.

In case you wish to use this as a standalone coffee maker, there is a 90 ounce reservoir – which is plenty of water to last a small office for one day.

You can also hook this up to a water line using the plumbed coffee maker conversion kit.

In case you’re feeling like a polyglot you can also change the language from English to Spanish or French 😉

In addition to the K150P you’ll also need the little water line hookup piece.

The Keurig K150P also comes in another version which does not have the plumbing functionality built in, but you can purchase the plumbing adapter separately. This model is the K150, and it’s still a great machine for small offices:

Here is the plumbing kit in case you wish to add it later:

2. Brew Express BEC-110 Direct Water Line Coffee Maker

The other notable machine which is ready to connect to a water line out of the box is the Brew Express BEC-110. Unlike the Keurig above, you need a water line setup with this coffee machine for it to work.

One workaround in case your office does not have the space to add a direct water line near the coffee maker is to place a 5 gallon bucket of water and pump water from it through a tube into the Brew Express BEC-110.

You can brew drip coffee through this machine and it uses coffee grounds instead of pods. If you’re environmentally conscious or just don’t want the slightly more costly pods from Keurig, you can opt for this machine instead.

It can brew up to 10 cups of coffee in one go(it just takes 6 minutes), and the coffee will remain hot in the carafe. The machine can be programmed to auto-start at any time, too, so you can time your brews perfectly to align with the office coffee break!

The only disadvantage is that this is quite an expensive coffee maker but there are very few directly plumbed coffee machines available so if that is a must have feature for you then these two are the only options you have.

3. BUNN My-Cafe MCO Direct Plumbed Coffee Maker

The BUNN My-Cafe MCO is a heavy duty coffee maker that hooks up directly into a water line and is ideal for commercial settings.

It’s a single serve coffee maker that works with K-Cups, which is really ideal for offices as folks can have a wide variety of pods to choose from.

The touch screen lets you choose customized settings for the type of brew you’re looking for, whether it’s regular coffee, hot chocolate, or even tea.

Capable of making 60 cups of coffee per hour, the Bunn My-Cafe will make sure your office space is well caffeinated.

A super useful function built into this direct line coffee maker is that while it can brew the usual 4 to 16 ounce cup sizes, you can actually increase the size of the servings in quarter-once increments.

You can really control your coffee portions with accuracy!

Like Nespresso machines, the Bunn MCO has an auto-eject system that disposes of the used pod as soon as you lift the handle to insert a new pod.

The used pod reservoir can hold up to 25 pods before needing to be emptied.

The tray is adjustable, too, so you can brew into a variety of mug sizes including travel mugs.

Note that the BUNN is a hard-plumbed coffee maker, so it can’t work as a standalone brewer. You must hook it up to a water line for it to work.

4. Keurig Water Line and Filter Kit

One of the biggest advantages of a directly plumbed coffee maker is that you can add a filter in between to get very pure water in your coffee.

Water purity is a huge factor in the end result taste of your coffee and if you live in an area with unclean or hard water, you’ll notice a huge difference in your coffee after filtering it or softening it.

Plus, softening/filtering the water before it reaches your coffee maker means that there will be less overall hard water scale buildup inside the machine so you will have to descale it much less often.

5. Inline Water Kit and Filter for Nespresso Machines

There are commercially available kits that let you add a water line to your Nespresso machine. The beauty of this kit is that it works with nearly all Nespresso machines.

The kit itself also has a built in filter so you’re actually getting a 2 in one solution. The only disadvantage is that you potentially lose the ability to move your machine around.

If you’re sticking around in your house or apartment for the foreseeable future and are not planning to move your coffee maker, you can permanently fix it in with this kit. Plus there are very detailed instructions and phone support.

How to hook up a coffee maker to a water line

There are lots of DIY methods for hooking up a coffee maker to a water line and a search on YouTube will yield a lot of results. Here’s the potential downsides, though:

• Modding your coffee maker will void the warranty
• You will need some mechanism to control the flow of water, and only enable it to flow when the level drops below a certain point
• If you screw up, you’ve ruined your coffee maker!

This tutorial below shows you how to hook up a Keurig K65(or any similar Keurig) to a water line:

Conclusion

There are a few other variants of the Keurig K150P such as the Keurig K155, which is a little cheaper and can brew up to 10 ounces in one go. Additionally, there is another variant of the Brew Master called the recessed version which fits inside your wall.

The recessed version is purely aesthetic and it has no different features than the BEC-110 we reviewed above.

Plumbed coffee makers can make for great additions to offices, and if you have a high volume of coffee consumption it’s definitely worth looking into.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last update on 2024-07-13 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API