Bad for your kettle? I know of people in London who don;t soften their water. Their kettles don't break. A kettle is too simple a device to care.
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6 years ago
Hard water - not filtered by water board?
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6 years ago
So inside a combi boiler it would never experience buildup?
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6 years ago
So yours isn't the type mentioned in this thread (nd presumably in a dishwasher) where you constantly supply several pounds of salt?
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6 years ago
What are you protecting? As you said it's good for you.
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6 years ago
Probably cheaper than softening the water.
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6 years ago
Because you want one a different colour? I hope you give the old one to charity.
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6 years ago
It could be softened but that is not the way to do it. You don't need soft water to flush toilets, water the garden, etc so it seems silly to pay the expense of treating it all.
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6 years ago
In soft water areas kettles just leak after a year or two - scale seals the leaks.
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6 years ago
Not properly scale, but they do get a coating. That is why in soft-water areas they add phosphates (phosphate dosing) to reduce the absorbtion of lead from old pipes.
SteveW
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6 years ago
Elsewhere in the thread someone said you needed air for it to deposit.
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6 years ago
Does it not clog the cistern?
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6 years ago
I've never known anyone's kettle break after only a year or two, and I'm in a very soft water area. I'd say they last 5 to 10 years.
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6 years ago
Our last kettle lasted 15 years. My parents replaced a 25 year old one simply because it looked very dated.
SteveW
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6 years ago
My grandfather sealed his with a bar of soap.
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6 years ago
I had the idea you threw things away a lot.
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6 years ago
Does your wife not volunteer in a charity shop?
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6 years ago
Turning one on with no water when it's full of scale makes a big mess.
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6 years ago
Notice who you?re replying to...
Tim
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6 years ago
I decoked my coffee maker: the sort that gurgled and spluttered while it heated water as it was drawn from a cold-water reservoir to the nozzle that dripped it over a filter of coffee grounds. Something in the descaling solution attacked the metal pipe and it began to leak. Maybe it had already corroded and had only been kept watertight by limescale that had now been dissolved.
I went over to the low-tech solution of a kettle of hot (but not boiling) water into a cafetiere. Quicker, quieter and no descaling needed. At least with a kettle you can heat the element with no water in for few seconds, and then drench it with a jug of cold water to shatter the scale off the element.
Living in a soft water area now, I no longer have a limescale problem.
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6 years ago
My kettle is probably about 10 years old. The only "breakage" was temporary when the thermostat which switches it off when the water boils failed so the kettle would not stay on. I got used to holding the switch down with the edge of a plate, and manually switching it off. I tend to make coffee rather than tea, so I don't want the water to get as high as 100 deg C anyway. One day I accidentally let the kettle boil for a minute or so before I switched it off. From then on, the thermostat has worked fine again: the switch now latches down again and clicks off when the water boils.
But no leaks. I still remember when I first heard about plastic kettles being developed, in the late 70s, and it made me think of chocolate teapots, because I though of plastics as things that softened and melted well below
100 deg C - not realising that new types of plastic were being developed that would withstand that temperature.