IT pro says his parents' Keurig smart coffee maker flooded their Wi-Fi with a terabyte of data

[Grim Tracey]

A Prusa field and community specialist known as Nomad found that his parents' Keurig smart coffee maker was behind their slow Wi-Fi, Tom's Hardware reports. The machine is a Keurig K-Supreme SMART with BrewID. A UniFi screenshot he posted on 6 October showed 9.94GB downloaded and 1,008.45GB uploaded over ten days and nine hours. That works out to about 97GB a day from a coffee machine

For comparison, the article notes it is roughly 27 times what an LG washing machine was reported to send in 2024. That washer story made headlines at the time. A coffee maker beating it by that margin is quite something. It saturated a wireless access point on its own

The story got more nuanced as Nomad looked into it. He later accepted that UniFi had not recorded a real terabyte leaving the house. His conclusion was that most of the traffic was local junk that did not escape his network. He did not capture packets, so the exact cause is still unknown

Rebooting the coffee maker and moving it to a separate VLAN fixed the problem, at least for now. The BrewID pod recognition feature led him to speculate that it is just DRM waiting to be enabled. The radio's MAC address block is registered to Jabil, a big contract manufacturer. Keurig had not commented at the time of publication

His original reaction was very relatable. He said he was immediately unplugging it and getting his parents a new coffee machine. Smart appliances misbehaving on home networks is a growing problem, and most people have no way of noticing. This is a good reason to put internet connected gadgets on their own network if your router allows it

Do your smart appliances live on a separate network? And does a coffee maker need Wi-Fi at all?

IT pro says his parents' Keurig smart coffee maker sent 1 terabyte of data over their Wi-Fi in 10 days - it saturated an access point on its own, but he says most of the traffic never left the home networkwww.tomshardware.com