Is your kettle as loud as a drill?

I guess that you design kettles for a living.

Look at the Which? reviews and I think you will find the main strengths and weaknesses of kettles listed, David.

One of the problems is that companies introduce new models without adequate testing. I expect that the kettles that don’t pour well have replaced models that are satisfactory in this respect.

What concerns me is the safety of plastic kettles. Putting a powerful electric heater in a plastic container is asking for trouble, in my view, whether it is a kettle or fan heater. I would like to know if plastic kettles are a fire hazard or give off toxic fumes if the overheating cutout fails.

I suggest contacting the manufacturer if you spot problems and posting comments online, as we are doing here.

Hi wavechange. The problems that I know of, in the use of plastics in kettles are:

Potential leaching of plasticisers into the water with unknown health effects (I prefer to buy bottle water in glass bottles for this reason)

The plastic itself might add to the fire (as a fuel) or get burnt up without adding energy. eg If you burn PVC you can make small amounts of Dioxine although it does not add to the flames, but I doubt that PVC is used in food containers for this reason.

I am planning to write to Bosch about my kettle, so maybe they will listen and produce a better product in future.

David, I pretty much agree with Wavechange and your conclusions.

The ‘plastic’ electric kettles are made of fire resistant material. But the kettle is unlikely to start a fire. It doesn’t just rely on the auto cut off when it reaches boiling, it also has a second ‘over-heating device’ usually called ‘boil dry’ cut off. So from a fire perspective they are probably safer than some earlier generations of kettles.

I’ve always been a little concerned about plasticiser leach and for that reason I never leave water in my kettle. I always fill with fresh water from the tap approximately what I need and always empty the dredges after I I have finished. (This both ensures that the water still has the maximum dissolved gases and minerals for a good cuppa and that furring is minimised because cooling water isn’t left standing in the kettle.) I never buy bottled water, so that aspect doesn’t concern me.

What the manufacturers need to do is to stop making kettles using the principal of design over function. As I said in a previous post, the important criteria are comfort, filling, pouring and efficiency. If any of those are wrong, then the kettle is woefully inadequate. IMO, the other functions such as speed, noise and looks are quite secondary to the basic requirements and everyone will have different priorities over those.

One conclusion I can draw is that from reading Which? and other reports and reading users’ reviews, there is no perfect kettle: they all have a failure rate regardless of cost. It is difficult to judge the real failure rates because people naturally tend to report dissatisfaction far more than satisfaction (why praise something that does what it is suppose to do!).

David and Terfar

I do hope that ALL plastic kettles are made of fire-resistant material and that it does not produce toxic fumes if it is overheated. A kettle normally contains a 2 – 3 kW heater, which is a great deal of power to dissipate if something goes wrong. 🙁

I hope that branded kettles are either made of unplasticised plastic or made using plasticisers that are safe for food use.. That might not apply with some of the cheap kettles on the market.

If a kettle is switched on when it is empty, it will not shut off in the normal way because there is no steam. The modern kettles I have taken apart have only a single self-resetting thermal cut-out. These work like a crude thermostat and it is well established that this sort of cut-out can fail if contacts weld together as a result of arcing during operation. What there should be, of course, is a thermal fuse, but these are non-replaceable by the average householder. Forty years ago it was common for kettles to eject their power connector if they overheated. That was probably more reliable and in these days, kettles were made of metal. Kettles are often listed among the appliances responsible for house fires, but I have not seen numbers.

I used to make oxygen-free water for biochemical research in my university lab. Simply bringing water to the boil expelled the oxygen, so I reckon that it is a myth that freshly boiled water contains oxygen. Maybe the mineral content is different in freshly boiled and reboiled water, but I did not measure that.

I always leave [or put back] about a cup full of water in the kettle after use as a precaution against it being switched on accidentally when empty – it is so easy to do that with the base-level flip-switch. I see Terfar’s point about avoiding limescale build-up but I feel that is a minor annoyance compared to the risk of boiling when empty as Wavechange has explained.

I leave surplus water in the kettle or fill up after use, for the same reason as John has given.

I have not carried out tests but suspect that most of the limescale will have been deposited by the time the water has boiled. Limescale is much less of a problem with a kettle with a shiny stainless steel base. Most of it accumulates as a coarse powder that can be emptied out.

I have to be careful here not to panic everyone. About Dioxines (chlorinated dibenzodioxine family); they are pretty nasty organic materials that can cause cancer, but fortunately they are usually found in very tiny amounts. They and other related organics like chlorinated dibenzofurans, can be produced when chlorinated materials such as PVC are burnt, so you should never burn these; although the clean up of a building site when the work has finished, often includes a bonfire rather than a skip which is bad practice because the rubbish usually contains scraps of PVC pipe and electric conduit.

So don’t worry about dioxines and kettles, because any plastic is unlikely to be PVC and it doesn’t get produced unless the plastic is caught up in flames. What gives more concern is the plasticisers added to the plastic to make it extrude more easily in production of the plastic parts.

It’s really nothing to do with noisy kettles but…

It’s an urban myth. As is the warning about freezing water in plastic bottles. Dioxins do not leach into bottled water even if the bottle is left in the sun in a car. There are still on going investigations into the leaching of dioxins into food and the current precautionary advice is:

Don’t use a plastic container to heat food in a microwave unless the container specifically states it is microwave safe.
Any cling film placed in a microwave should not be touching the food.

Dioxins are plasticisers: they are highly carcinogenic. Fortunately dioxins have low volatility and low water solubility ( http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp104-c3.pdf ).

Thank you, I was going to have asked about microwaving plastic. I know some people who microwave food in melamine plastic bowls.

Terfar – Dioxins are not used as plasticisers.

fl – I suggest you follow Terfar’s advice and don’t microwave food in any plastic unless it is intended for the purpose. Pyrex containers are ideal.

corrected my E/mail address,
yours Roy