Vitamix Plastic 5200 Series Blender, White, 1200 Watts

I am not - WAS not - much of a "blender guy", but the Vitamix 5200 changed that. And even though I am typing this all out in a product review, where that sort of sentiment belongs, it still sounds absurd to me. Who gets impressed by a *blender*? Me, apparently. Prior to this Vitamix the only blender I had ever used in my *entire life* was an ancient Osterizer from the 70s. The thing is literally older than I am, but beyond all reasonable expectations it still somehow works. Go Osterizer, I guess? This year I grew way too many hot peppers, decided to make a bunch of hot sauce with them, and suddenly the Osterizer showed its age. While it was fine blending a couple of smoothies a month for us, it struggled to blend up 12 litres of hot sauce in one night, so I figured maybe the time had come to get a "real" (I.E. manufactured in this century) blender. After some internet research I selected the Vitamix 5200 as being the most likely not to struggle through my new hot sauce hobby, only to find that I was basically swatting a fly with a nuke. That old Osterizer took about 2 hours of blending and cooling down to do 12 litres of my (admittedly very thick) hot sauce puree. The Vitamix 5200 did all 12 litres in less than 2 minutes. The Vitamix 5200 is *absurd*. And that has made it life-changing for us. It doesn't matter what you put in there. You can just shove the most fibrous of vegetables in there, right up to the brim, and *bvvvvvt*, instantly pureed. Shove a bunch of ice in there...instant slushy. Anything that is a solid that you no longer want to be a solid anymore this blender will handle. So we went from a household that might make a couple of smoothies every month to one that is now bulk-making sauces, soups, and so forth. We even just toss hole grains of various types (wheat, oatmeal, rye, flax, etc.) and turn them into our own multi-grain flower, then into pre-mixed dry bread ingredients. When we are "low spoons" - I.E. we just don't have the jam to cook properly - we can just pull out some of our pre-made sauce from the freezer, drop it on some noodles, et voila: actual food groups get consumed. As an ADHD household we have been familiar with the concept of "a critical threshold of ease of use" for some time, but we never expected to find that in a *blender*. Somehow, however, the thing is both just easy enough to use and powerful enough to handle whatever we throw at it with zero prep work that has managed to make the "pre-cooking your nutritious meals" parts of adulting just easy enough that we can actually do them on a regular basis. If you're looking for a top-of-the-line blender for your home, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything that would top it, I think. All those rave reviews on the internet were, for once, actually not lying.

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Comes with US plug and required 120V. Emailed producer, who said that they themselves do not sell US products to outside the US and strongly recommend against using a down-stepper transformer. DO NOT try connecting it directly without a transformer either as this would fry the device

Great Vitamix. Restaurants use this specific one. Less of a mess vs a square jug also which a bonus.

TLDR; Significantly better product than competition in the sub $250 range. Every day I make a protein shake with milk, ice, peanut butter, protein powder, etc. I've done this for 5+ years. In that time, we've gone through 4 blenders in the $100-$200 price range. You can immediately tell that the Vitamix is much higher quality than products in that lower price range. I like that the variable control has a really wide range -- both much slower and the low end, and much higher power at the high end than other blenders. It does not magically overcome the basic problems of physics. If you do not put the ingredients in the right way and manage the variable speed, you will get air bubbles and other common issues. If the blades don't touch anything, they will not blend anything. If this disappoints you, then much much disappointment awaits you. However, I find these issues to be much easier to deal with in the Vitamix than in other blenders. I have yet to encounter the "overheat" problem that others have mentioned. Though, my previous Hamilton Beach blender would shutoff 2-3 times while making my smoothie. The Vitamix has yet to do this. So, I suspect it suffers from this issue less than competitors. It is tall. Arguably too tall. Get a different Vitamix if that is a problem for you.