hey there this is dr. Falcon and today I'm gonna discuss the best way to clean the Black & Decker conical burr grinder which I reviewed previously on my website which is gibberish as my native language is the title of it the address is Journal dr. Falcon calm so as I talked about earlier this is a really inexpensive conical burr grinder it's probably one of the least expensive burr grinders you could get and one of the drawbacks to this particular unit because it's so inexpensive is that there's a certain flaw in its design which means that you really have to clean it on a regular basis now of course there are a couple reasons that you should clean your grinder of any kind or there be a burr grinder or chopper grinder one being if you look in this receptacle here with a grind scope even if you do a pretty good job of shaking all your coffee out there's a residue that gets left behind these little coffee grounds get stuck in here too and what happens is that if you don't grind coffee on a regular basis this will actually get rancid inside the oil from the coffee gets chopped up when you grind the beans up and sticks to the inside of this reservoir so regardless of the design of your grinder you should always take care to clean this receptacle where the grinds go in as well as a hopper if it's a cone like detachable style now this particular model just has a hatch so you can just wipe it clean now in either case I want to let you know that you should not use dish detergent in order to claim this as the dish soap and the residue can get left behind as well so what I recommend what I usually do is I take a brush such as the one that's included with a black and decker and I clean the inside like this just sort of scrape all the grinds out and then I'll take a paper towel and get some more of it out and then after that what I do is I just rinse it and then so I have a paper towel and let it air dry the rest of the way it's really just to sort of remove remove the oil from the inside of the plastic now back to this particular model there are some things that are really to do in order to clean it so that continues to operate and in fact before I figure out how to do this myself I thought the unit had already broken and reading a review reviews of this unit on amazon.com and a couple other coffees sites people say that it dies within a month or two of use and just stops grinding coffee what that actually may have been is a flaw that I discovered in the design whereas this little shoot that I'm indicating with the brush the the opposing side on the grinder gets caked full of coffee grounds and I'll show that in just a second and what happens is that it gets impacted and even if this is completely empty it backs up all the coffee and then slows down the motor to the point where it sounds like it's dying and so I'm curious how many of those people who gave negative reviews based on the longevity of this actually just had a really backed up grinder so as I said before this is the area in which the coffee comes out of the grinder in the receptacle and you'll need to take care to clean this area with your brush this isn't that big of a deal but if you don't do it on a regular basis you can get some buildup here you'll also want to do that on the lid not a big deal but there's a little Ridge in here and coffee and get stuck now I'm gonna zoom in a little bit and I want to show you the part that's really important to get and then I'm going to show you the best way to clean it alright so what we have here is that receptacle that I was telling about this is like the chute by which all the coffee comes out from the top and as you can see it's pretty blocked as it is this whole rectangular area is where the coffee comes out and it's it's pretty much caked in now what's up about this is that I just clean this less than a week ago I clean it every Friday so let's see it's been five days so just in that amount of time it's already gotten caked over so if you haven't cleaned this for a month or maybe even two months depending on how much you use your grinder this can become blocked to the point where you think it was broken so let me show you the best way to clean that the first thing I do is I use the included brush and I just start going at it I also try to get in the Ridge area know the proper term for that is I'm not really sure if it's important but I tell you after thinking was broken the first time I pretty much clean as much of this as I can I also take time to clean the corners that are in the in the grinder that's where that plastic hopper goes the real reason to do that aside from just being clean is that the repository ground coffee goes has to be flush in here otherwise it doesn't trigger the safety mechanism so you want to make sure that's clean as well I'm just going to clean this up a little bit more and then you have to do this part gets turn over tap it out and then go back to work and this may take a while longer than it should this is kind of a weird design I'm not really sure why this particular grinder was designed this way but this is a lot of maintenance given that it's a pretty basic grinder I'm scrubbing it out pretty good I'm just going to tap it over one more time and now I want to show you after all that effort there's still a fair amount of coffee caked in there so I want to show you the other thing that you have to do I use a metal barbecue middle barbecue skewer now you may have one that's made out of bamboo you could use a toothpick you could use a sharp knife anything with a fine point so what you want to do is you want to take this device whatever you use again I'm using a metal barbecue skewer that I use on my grill sorry can work sucks anyway and what you do is you you literally have to chip away the caked on compacted coffee then you can use the brush again just to sort of get any loose material that's there now I have a theory that depending on the type of coffee grind that you use like if you use a finer grind I have a feeling that it gets kicked in more quickly I actually use a medium grind so if you carry us spending my viewers out there who use this particular coffee grinder to find they have less obstruction with a finer grind or a coarser grind and which one kind of gives them the least amount of trouble and there we have it it's um unobstructed and you can still see there's some coffee grounds around there around this area you know just clean it out but at that point it's just mostly for looks this is the very important part here this chute and it needs to be clear for it to function properly anyway this is dr. Faulk and I'm just showing you the best way to clean the Black and Decker conical burr grinder it's still a pretty good deal it's around 20 to 30 bucks depending on where you get it and so if you're tight on a budget then if you just clean it on a regular basis maybe once a week or once every two weeks depending on the use it'll hopefully give you a pretty long lifetime anyway this dr. Falcon check out my blog at Journal dr. Falcon com and thanks for watching