GROHE 31455DC0 High C-Spout Blue Home Duo Starter Kit - Stainless Steel (2-Piece)

I spent a long time deliberating over this, and the lack of many reviews made figuring out if this was a good purchase difficult, so I hope this can help prospective buyers! First off, I picked this up outside of Amazon for about £650ish after cashback from Grohe. I thought this was a pretty good deal, since they retail mostly around the £1k mark which is steep! That being said, it's still and expensive tap! Grohe were quick to send the cashback (as a cheque) and even included a handwritten note, which I thought was a nice touch.The tap itself: it's really good. For me, the draw was the convenience of having chilled and sparkling water readily available, rather than buying copious plastic bottles worth of sparkling water and refilling a BRITA filter and storing in the fridge. If you think you'll make your money back through those savings, you might, but that's not the real reason to buy it, it's mostly convenience.What I was most concerned about was the sparkling water, but I added a photo to show just how good it is. As good as from a bottle, with ease. Another reviewer mentioned the sparkling water was disappointing, but based on how I read that review it was just after installing, which I was initially disappointed with as well. After a day or two, it settled down and the sparkling water came out perfect. It seems like the first glass or so after changing the gas canister is weak sparkling, but it then improves as it flushes through the system.As others have mentioned, the cooling unit is quite substantial, and has a warm air vent on the base of the unit. You're suppose to drill a hole into the kitchen unit for the vent to fit into but I just elevated the unit on some scrap mdf so that it had plenty of ventilation. It's not the quietest unit, but when it's installed and the kitchen unit doors are closed, you can't really hear it. It should fit into any standard kitchen unit quite comfortably.Installation:I've never done any plumbing in my life, EVER. So this was a little daunting, but to be honest, if you have the right tools, it's a doddle. Removing the old tap was the hard part, once that was done, installing the Grohe tap was easy. The instructions are Ikea like drawings, but there are Youtube videos to reference as well. To help, as other reviewers helped me, here's what you need:General:Pair of pump pliersWrench3/8 BSP to 15mm adapter (Screwfix and Amazon sell these, I used Screwfix part no. 6089R)Olives if you have a compression isolation valveThe Grohe tap uses flexible hoses with a 3/8 BSP fitting, and does not provide an adapter to 15mm pipes that are commonly used in the UK, but can be picked up for a few quid.To remove my old tap, I needed a box spanner, olive puller and pipe cutter (after I messed up the old olive!). Check your existing tap fitting to check what you'll need to remove it, the Grohe tap doesn't require a box spanner by my old one did.If you've never done any plumbing like me, and something is proving difficult, chances are there's a tool that you need. Don't butcher the existing work or try and force something that isn't moving! There are loads of useful videos on Youtube by actual plumbers that can help, and were really useful.There are some newer models out now, which as far as I can tell only include bluetooth and a companion app to tell you when the filter and CO2 cartridge is low. For the discounted prices you can pick up the non-bluetooth units at now, you can make a real saving.

The product is fairly simple to install and looks good. The issue is that the unit only supplies 300ml of chilled water at any one time before the temp increases to ambient. GROHE support engineers told me as water is drawn from the reservoir it fills with mains water mixing with the chilled increasing the temperature, seems a poor design to me. The spec states up to 3 litres an hour which is true in 300ml intervals every 10 minutes, but does not meet family demands at meal times etc, where you end up with two chilled glasses and two ambient glasses. I think GROHE should be clearer in managing expectations.

Just finished fitting one of these to replace a mixer tap at an island sink, and it was pretty hairy because Grohe pipes are 3/8" and standard UK plumbing is 15mm. So I needed to find reducing compression couplers, and I bought the wrong thing three times before I found ones that worked - 12mm to 15mm reducing couplers. The ones that worked were from Screwfix, the ones that didn't were from my local plumbing store - both ostensibly 12mm but one thread fitted and the other didn't. Go figure.The tap quality is superb, I have to say, but the IKEA style installation manual is frustrating and you need to read it several times to get it right.What you might not realise from the picture beside this article is that the cooling and filtering unit is actually pretty big - equivalent to a medium-sized desktop computer, the sort you stand on your floor cos it's too big for your desk. The first thing you find in the box is a stencil showing you the unit needs to be 35mm from the side of the cupboard (for the air intake?) and where to drill the hole for the output vent. It also insists the unit must not touch the waste pipe from the sink above but doesn't say why. I could not avoid that and haven't found it to be a problem yet.The chiller power lead is continental two-pin with a UK adaptor in the box. But the bit that connects to the unit is standard kettle-style connector, the sort most PCs use. So if you have a spare long kettle-type lead hanging around you can use that and save yourself the bulk of the adaptor.A few observations: the reason you drill a 65mm hole in the floor of the cupboard is because the chilling unit vents downwards into the space under the cupboard plinth (you better have a space). The manual suggests this outlet is vented to an outlet drilled in the plinth but Grohe does not supply a vent pipe or any means of attaching one so forget about that. .There are more water pipes in the box than you actually need - the spare pipe is in fact an extension for the one built into the unit. The manual recommends you use washers when connecting the pipes but supplies none, and the supplied pipes have built-in washers, so do you actually need to add more? Where I could see no built-in washer I used that white plumber's tape, and that seems to have worked. The push-in water pipes one inserted seem impossible to remove - there are clips to hold them in place but I could not get the clips to go on and since I could not get the pipes out by tugging hard on them, don't think the clips are needed anyway.When I switched the unit on for the first time it made quite a racket. Well, it is a fridge. After a few minutes it seemed to quieten down - but you might have to get used to an occasional extra hum in your kitchen. It makes the same amount of noise as kitchen fridges did 20 years ago, and seem not to, any more (only just realised that!)The most frustrating - and worrying - part of the installation was the adjusting of the water filter. Once you have tested for hardness you are supposed to tug down on the filter mounting collar to expose a bracket. Unscrew that bracket and the main part of the filter housing can be pulled down. You do this to set a certain position on the swivel cap according to water hardness. Well, when you tug down on the filter collar it snaps off - it appears to have been glued on. Turns out this is not a problem - the collar actually seems to fulfil no function apart from blocking access to the bracket. I set the filter hardness on the cap, replaced the filter (really fiddly job), screwed the bracket back in... and slid the redundant collar up over the filter cartridge to roughly where it had been before it broke off. In case I need it after all at some pointYou are advised to wait six hours for the water to chill before using the sparkling tap. As I write this I still have two hours to go. If I have anything to add further down the line I'll do an edit and maybe even post a picture. If I find any leaks that are my fault however I might keep that to myself.On first use, although everything seemed to work fine and the water is chilled the sparkling water function was disappointing, but after several glasses the cloudiness disappeared and the tap worked fine.I contacted Grohe for help when I thought the unit was not working properly and they sent it an engineer at no cost to check the installation. He told me everything was fine and the carbonation took a little while to kick in.Editing this a year later I have to say the push buttons on the tap can be temperamental - the wife hates them. I noticed that Grohe Blue units in the USA have a mechanical swivelling knob instead. This is much easier to use. Sadly I think Grohe have changed all designs to the electronic push button type.I have to say that searching for resources online was and is very frustrating as most of the videos and downloadable manuals are way out of date and refer to models that were far more complex to install. Grohe has done nothing in terms of model numbers or names to differentiate between the updated units, so you can waste ages browsing pdfs of obsolete models.The US versions of this unit are particularly dated, with exterior filters and pipes running everywhere (and the only place to obtain replacement CO2 tanks is from a bar supplies company!)EDIT: I wanted to add that after more than a year of use I'm really glad I got this tap. It saves endlessly lugging plastic bottles and once you get into the swing of ordering CO2 bcartridges from Germany it is really easy to keep going. My only misgiving is that the lights on the tap are supposed to change colour or flash when the CO2 runs low or the filter needs changing but usually the first you find out about the CO2 is the water pressure dropping.I hate to say 'your friends will envy you' but most of our guests are very impressed by sparking water on tap. I have some experience of other installations and the Grohe is by far the most reliable and easy to use.Also the spout on the 'conventional' hot/cold is extremely high quality, and gives a soft, constant focused stream of water even after a year+ of use in hard-water London.

A great concept and when it works, I really like it. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it doesn't - in the 6 months I've had the item, it has broken down 3 times and Grohe's very poor customer service has meant that it has been out-of-action for several weeks each time.The user manual is also very poor - the various fault codes displayed on my appliance weren't even listed in the manual. What's worse is that calls and emails to Grohe customer services go unanswered - each time I've tried to report a fault, I've had to email and call several to get any response and when a reply has finally come, it is several weeks after I reported the fault. This is really very poor for a large, reputable organisation.I would not recommend this item.