A kettle conundrum

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Our electric kettle (on the left in the photo) just stopped working. Luckily this isn’t the major disaster it could be, because we still have the one-cup device to make boiling water one cup at a time, and of course we can heat water in a pan on the stove if we need larger volumes. The snag with that is that it’s easy to leave it to heat up for a few minutes then come back and find that the pan is half empty and the kitchen is full of steam! So we really do still need a kettle, otherwise all work might grind to a halt! I checked the fuse in the plug and looked for any loose wires but couldn’t see anything and a new fuse didn’t solve the problem. I suspect the actual element has blown but this kettle has a concealed element inside the base and we can’t even get to it because it’s screwed shut with special anti-tamper screws with triangular heads. We have a set of screwdriver bits in all sorts of shapes – hexagonal, square, cross, star-shaped – but not triangular. It’s probably not worth the bother of buying a set of triangular screwdrivers to open it up and see if the element might be the problem, and then trying to get a new element – and there’s no guarantee that such a thing might be available – when the kettle itself is actually quite old anyway, the plastic around the edges of the knob on the lid is starting to break off a bit at a time. With my habit of not throwing anything out I had a look in the cupboard under the stairs and there I found two other kettles. One (on the right) is the kettle we used to use on the hob when we had a range cooker, but now we have an induction hob and although it’s stainless steel it isn’t magnetic so won’t work on induction. So I need to clean that up and find it a new home. The other (in the middle) is an old electric kettle which originally belonged to my great-uncle, which my mother gave to me to take to university. After that when I moved to live on a boat it came with me but was too powerful for the limited electric supply so I had to change the element to a lower-power version so I could make tea and toast at the same time without tripping the electricity! It still works but it dates from the era before fancy innovations such as automatic switch-off and it has to be completely filled in order to cover the element, so hopelessly inefficient unless you really do need that much hot water. It is lovely and quiet though, and it pours beautifully! So now I’m on the quest for a new electric kettle… All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2023.