While it took a while to get here, my husband agrees with me that the Avanti Hot and Cold Water Dispenser was well worth the wait.
After our old dispenser gave up the ghost after twenty plus years, we looked at each other and said, 'what do we do now?' We tried shopping for another one locally but nobody had what we were looking for and we were, quite frankly, spoiled.
What do we like about the Avanti?
As the poet put it, let me count the ways.
First of all, because of its Energy Saver feature, the Avanti consumes less electricity than our old dispenser which ran constantly. It was also noisy. The Avanti, in contrast, is very quiet.
The Avanti features a neat little safety lock on the hot water faucet, which the old dispenser did not The storage space in the bottom, while it doesn't keep anything cold, is quite handy.
The Avanti's white plastic square design looks clean and nice. Our old brown metal dispenser did not. Also, unlike some of the round dispensers we looked at, the Avanti is not 'tippy'. Since it sits next to the kitchen doorway and a heavy traffic area, this was a real concern.
We also looked at dispensers that pumped from the bottom as well as the reviews and decided they were not for us.
The only CON was a chemical, almost musty, taste in the water for a few weeks after we got the Avanti, but that is now gone.
All in all, we are extremely pleased with the Avanti. It's much, much better than our old dispenser and we definitely give it 5 stars.
Update 7/3/2012
Now there is a problem. (Another reviewer had the same thing happen to them in December 2010 and, in their case, it was a broken hot water line.).
When I changed the three gallon bottle for a fresh one yesterday, everything seemed fine.
As recommended, (and as usual), I left the unit unplugged, ran 4 cups of water out through the hot water faucet then plugged in the unit and turned it on.
My husband woke me at around 11 p.m. with the news that there was a huge puddle around the dispenser and what should he do? I unplugged the unit, removed the bottle and emptied the reservoir through the hot water faucet. A seam along the top of the bottom cabinet door was wet and the drip catcher under the faucets was full.
Not wanting to spend the rest of the night working on the problem, I unplugged the unit and removed the bottle altogether.
After carefully drying everything off this afternoon, I replaced the bottle, removed another 4 cups of water via the hot water faucet, plugged in the unit again and turned on the hot and cold water. At first everything seemed fine. Then an hour later, I found another puddle. This time it appeared to be the result of an overflow from the reservoir, and the water level, which I had carefully marked on the outside of the bottle, had gone down about 25%.
We have spent the rest of today trying this and that. Now the new bottle is empty, there is still a puddle of water on the floor, tomorrow is July 4th and it's too late in the day to call Avanti's Customer Service. However, first thing, Monday, I'm going to call them and see what they have to say.
Film at 11.
Update, Tuesday, July 10, 2012
I called Avanti's Customer Service number yesterday. Once I reached a technician, she questioned me about the problem in detail and I listed all the steps I had followed.
She said, in her opinion, we needed a service call and gave the number of an authorized repair shop in our area.
The repairman arrived first thing this morning. After he checked out the entire unit and found no problem, he called Avanti's Customer Service.
The Avanti technician suggested that he look at the water bottle. He did and, sure enough, there was our problem. We'd been using three gallon plastic molded bottles which we'd purchased from the same health food store where we get our distilled water.
The bottle has four seams around the top, which fits snugly into the collar above the reservoir. When we examined the last bottle we used, we noticed some extra material on a couple of the seams. This extra material is known in the plastic molding industry as 'flash' and it's supposed to be trimmed or buffed off as soon as the part comes out of the press. (More years ago than I care to count, I worked as a press operator in a plastic molding plant which made glasses for American Airlines. So I know all about 'flash'.)
The Avanti Customer Service technician said this is not an uncommon problem with these plastic bottles.
As the repairman explained, the Avanti dispenser's operation depends on maintaining an intact vacuum seal between the bottle's top and the reservoir. When a defective bottle is installed, the sheer weight of three gallons of water creates the necessary vacuum seal and it'll stay that way with no leaks until a certain amount of water is removed from the dispenser. However, as the bottle's level goes down, it weighs less and raises slightly. This, in turn, exposes the four seams around the bottle's top. The space between the the extra seam material, or 'flash', creates an air space between the bottle and the reservoir collar. When this happens, the vacuum seal is lost. The bottle level then starts gradually going down by itself for no apparent reason and, after an hour or so, there's water all over the floor.
Because our dispenser is over two years old and out of warranty, we had to pay for the service call. However, it was worth it to us and I will still give the Avanti Water Dispenser an unequivocal five stars both for their Customer Service department's helpful and courteous response and the excellence of the product itself.
December 9, 2012
Update: Our Avanti dispenser is still working fine and, to date, we've had no more problems. I will say though, for anyone who might be interested, we only use distilled water which we purchase at a local health food for .89c per gallon. It's also very important to remove 4 cups of water from the dispenser via the hot water faucet immediately after replacing the bottle.
The humidifer arrived in good shape, looked good, and fit nicely in front of my (unused) fireplace. I liked the idea of being able to bring water to the unit and to refill from the top, but I agree with another reviewer that the top is difficult to remove while keeping the filter in place and hard to reassemble if the filter has moved out of place. Upon turning on, I found that low speed did not work at all; unit would run only on high speed. Unfortunately the unit is noisy at high speed. I also found the although I could hear clicking at a low and high range when I turned the humidity knob, the unit would only turn on when I manually moved the knob to that high range setting. The only way the unit would turn off was when I turned off the fan switch. If I turned the humidity knob to a point below the high range setting, it would never turn on by itself, even though the humidity in the room was changing. I returned the unit and requested a refund.
