Don't Use This If Baby Is Sleeping.

My wife and I purchased this five speed blender quite a few years ago for around $100. I know that we have seen them as low as $85 but we have also seen them as high as $150 at Sears. When we saw this one on sale for $100 we thought it would be a nice addition to our kitchen. With us having 8 children we would like to save money where ever we go, and a lot of times we would blend up some food for our babies so that we did not have to pay the higher price of junior baby foods. KitchenAid has been around for several years, so the name alone says that this is a good quality workmanship blender. So after looking at this blender for quite a few minutes in the store, with the sleek colorful design that this has, we went ahead and invested the money into this product.

Description
With the sleek pitcher design, and the patented blades powerful 0.9 hp motor helps you prepare baby food in a matter of seconds. This will not take up much space on your counter. It is only 16 inches in height, by 8 inches in width, and 9 inches deep. But if you do have to move it around it only weighs approximately 12 pounds. I have lifted some other blenders in my time and sometimes it feels like I am going to get a hernia by lifting them, but this one's not one of them. This has a poly carbonate pitcher that is clear and comes with a 2 ounce ingredient cap. The lid is of a different color and is textured. It is very easy to grab the lid at the top and pull outward. This also has on the base unit with four rubber legs that will hold the unit still and eight clean touch control pads on the front. The blades that are inside the bottom of the blender are made of stainless steel and are positioned in four different spots. If you look between the bottom of the food compartment and the top of the motor you will see a steel reinforced coupler with a bunch of teeth, this is what provides power to the blades when you switch this on. To keep this motor to be able to run for quite a long time, they have an airflow design that will help keep the motor cool for continuous use. Even though they advertise that this is a quiet operating motor and they make the base out of a heavy diecast metal for stability this is still, and I have yet to find any blender that is quite. This unit basically comes in three pieces, the top that will act as an ingredient cup, the middle, which is the food compartment, and the base which houses the motor.

Features
There are a lot of nice features on this particular model. There is a seamless smooth control, easy touch panel that wipes clean very easily. There is an automatic crushed ice button, instead of just hitting the button that says on and holding it in that position till you are done this will automatically stop when the ice is a chopped. This also has the Intelli-speed control that will adjust to the thickness of stuff that you put inside, the thicker this stuff is the faster the motor will. Stuff like butter, this will give you more power to chop it up, and this motor will adjust for that thickness. This one piece pitcher that sits on top has a capacity of 56 ounces, and it is scratch and stain and shatter resistant. Plus it has built-in drain holes so that no food will get trapped and you do not have to disassemble the unit to clean it out. The pitcher has a nice contour shape so that the food that is not chopped up will be pulled to the bottom during processing. KitchenAid has a lot of versatility, so they have put out in nine different colors, and they are Empire Red, Metallic Chrome, White, Tangerine, Caviar, Glossy Cinnamon, Onyx Black, Blue Willow, and Silver Metallic. There is also an electronic mixing sensor and comes included with five different speeds plus a pulse feature at any speed.


Uses
My wife and I have used this for several different things, we started out using it to purée baby food instead of buying it at those ridiculously high prices. We would just take whatever we were having for dinner, when the child gets old enough and stick it in the blender and it was actually better for the baby than buying the processed food in a jar. We have also made lots of sauces and puréed tomatoes for spaghetti. My wife has used this for making egg nog around Christmas time. She also uses her dip making recipes for parties. This does an excellent job for the iced drinks such as daiquiris and margaritas, plus a real good job on smoothies. We have found out that this is not do a very good job of making shakes, because the ice cream is so thick, but we have found out upon further use, that if you use a lot of milk and a lot of liquids to whatever you are doing, the better this blender seems to work.

Durability
With the fact that top food compartment is shatterproof and stain resistant and cleans up excellent in the dishwasher, makes this to be one of the most durable blenders on the market. We have also used this continuously for approximately 1 hour for parties, and it still never overheated. One of my main concerns is trying to find a blunder that is very quiet. But, my wife and I have yet to find one that is made that is extremely quiet. I would have to give this a rating of five on a one to 10 rating, for its noisiness. This particular model is definitely not quiet I would not recommend running this if you are trying to get the baby to go to sleep.

Warranty
KitchenAid has an excellent one-year hasslefree replacement policy. And that is if it fails during the first year that they will replace it free of charge. They will deliver it right to your front door and arrange for the return of the broken appliance and get this instead of just letting your new appliance continue out the rest of that warranty. They will insure and guarantee that new appliance for an additional year.

Conclusion
After reading this review, I hope that someone out there might be able to tell me where to find a very quiet blender. Even though this one is not quiet, it does work very well and will do the job at it advertises to do. I do like the easy pushbutton control panel and the fact that the top is shatterproof. But until another one comes along that is quieter than this one. I guess I will just keep on using this for years to come.