Just bought a new 3kw Breville kettle, currently on offer at ?20 from Sainburys. Trying it out with the max 1.7 L water, it boiled like crazy for a full 45 seconds before finally turning itself off. Did this twice with the same result. Tried 1 litre of water, this boiled in 2 minutes and then took another 30 seconds of rapid boiling before turning itself off. In each case that means if left to its own devices it will use 25% more electricity than it needs to!
OK so I can turn it off manually but the point of an automatic kettle is that you shouldn't have to stand over it. I am wondering if I should return it as faulty or whether such sluggish performance is considered acceptable?
My recently deceased Wilko kettle, a plastic jobbie that cost about ?3.99, was slow to boil (only a 1800 W element) but would turn itself off in about
My cheapy Asda Jug kettle lid has to be very firmly closed before the steam will trigger the off mechanism. If this is not your problem I would class it as not fit for purpose and exchange it.
Eventually there'll be so much water condensed in the handle that it'll short out. Saw this in a cafe and told the ownere what it was. She didn't have another kettle - bit risky in a cafe.
I had a couple of Breville kettles (traditional shape metal ones) which did the same. In fact one of them quite often completely failed to turn off automatically. Fortunately they had quite high power elements and I rarely boil more than a 500ml so it was not too inconvenient to watch them. I would guess it is a design fault.
Yes the lid is rather loose fitting so I think that is the problem as suggested by Bob Minchin. I can't see how it could be made to fit any tighter though the way it is designed, there is nothing to hold it firmly in place. The whole thing seems to have an oddly complicated design, I think I'll just return it for a refund and get a different make kettle.
Kettles should be simple devices but Breville seem to be trying to make them into something highbrow. Even the box exhorts you to "get creative" with your kettle, with a list of hot drinks you might like to try!
I had an electric kettle which switched off late and luckily could reposition the thermocouple visible behind a vent grating at the top of the kettle to place it more squarely in the rising steam.
It improved a bit but not a huge amount and I wonder if the thermocouple was slightly out of spec. Quality control on a bargain kettle is probably not the greatest.
I had a Tesco kettle (?3-4 ish IIRR) where the element actually appeared to catch fire while under water - there was a red flame clearly visible through the plastic window. Its similarly priced replacement is so far holding up o.k.
We have a 3KW plastic jug kettle (ca 12 quid from Argos to replace an almost identical Tesco kettle) which, if allowed to boil until the sensor shuts it off as a safety/courtesy would take anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds with ca 700ml fill (which is an unconscionably long time - it's bad enough to wait for a 3KW kettle to boil even 700mL but the final denouement of boiling until the safety/courtesy feature kicks in has all the ear marks of a car crash in slow motion).
If you're boiling half to one litre of water with a 3KW kettle, the chances are high that you will still be present to shut it off the moment it comes to the boil rather than stand there like a lemon and let it waste energy on a job already done. IOW, just regard the automatic shut off when the water is on the boil as a safety/courtesy feature that you can (and should) pre-empt unless you're otherwise pre-occupied (rinsing the pot and or tea mug out or have had to answer the front door bell or whatever).
With a modern jug kettle, that just means lifting it off its docking base to pour the boiling water. Lifting a boiling jug kettle off its docking base allows the interlock pin to trip the same switch/boiling sensor stat just before it disconnects from the base, saving electrical erosion on the base connector contacts.
I take full advantage of this particular safety/convenience feature, only using the actual switch lever when I know I'm not going to have the other tea making tasks completed in a timely fashion to leave it a few degrees short of the boiling point and only a few seconds away from going on the boil when I switch it back on, thus minimising energy wasted in steaming up the kitchen.
Whenever you're commissioning a new kettle (the instructions always advise you to boil at least two lots of water before using it for actual tea brewing/instant coffee or whatever), you can verify the efficacy of this anti-boil dry/convenience feature for future peace of mind. I suppose as long as it cuts off a full kettle's worth in less than a minute, that's the safety aspect covered even if it isn't exactly what you'd call a 'convenience feature'.
I'm not sure whether this is typical but, ime, the anti-boil dry cut out sensing time seems to get shorter with use becoming more of a convenience than a safety feature so that 45 seconds interval may well drop down to the 10 to 15 seconds mark after a few months use anyway. However, you may want to keep tabs on this time delay to make sure it isn't getting gradually longer and longer to cut off the boiling kettle rather than getting shorter and shorter over the next week or three's worth of use.
45 seconds *does* seem rather a long time but it's been over a year since I last had reason to allow a full 1.7 litre's worth to come to the boil and allow it to rely on the automatic shut off feature so I'm afraid I can't offer you any comparative times other than for the 700mL case.
Traditional ones should be virtually 100% efficient since the heating element is immersed in water so there's nowhere else for the heat to go.
However I'm not so sure about the modern design where the element is under the base of the kettle (or actually *is* the base of the kettle? - I'm not quite sure how those work not having opened one up), since the some heat will surely be radiated downwards.
Our kettle (like all others, I suspect) has/had a mesh filter in the spout. It recently started crumbling, so I took it out. Now the kettle takes a lot longer to switch off, and I suppose it's because more of the steam is escaping via the spout, and less is being directed into whichever mechanism detects it.
This is the prioblem that microwaves were supposed to address, but even if microwaves only heat the water and not the container, the question remains as to how efficiently the electricity gets turned into microwave energy by the magnetron and I don't know the answer to that.
There's also the problem that microwaves aren't realy directable in an oven so not all of them 'enter' the food so are wasted. I did check mine out once you can do this by putting a few 100ml of water in a container and measuring the temperature rise of teh water after say 2 mins can;t remmebr the calculation but you end up with gettign a fugure of wattage for yuor oven my 650W came out at about 400W but it was an old oven so I wasn't too suprised.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.