If you live in England than you know that a kitchen isn’t complete without a good kettle. We use ours at least twice a day (morning and afternoon tea), usually three times (night time tea, coffee, pasta water, etc.).

A couple weeks ago our Kenwood Turin SJM400 Kettle, 1.7 Litre (Brushed Metal) bit the dust. It was sad – we liked the look of the kettle but we were more than a match its crappy on/off switch that completely fell to pieces. So the search for a new kettle began, and I ended up with the Philips HD4671/20 Energy Efficient Kettle Brushed Metal 3.0KW 1.7L.

I don’t usually write product reviews, but I’ve been so pleased with the new Philips kettle that I feel compelled to extol its virtues:

• One cup brewing. The Philips kettle has a minimum fill capacity of 1 cup. By contrast, the Kenwood had a minimum of 0.7L, totally overkill for a single cup of tea. Now I can boil less water at a time, using less electricity – three cheers for energy efficiency!
• Right/Left Water Indicators. In other words, there are fill markers on both sides of the kettle which makes it easy to read no matter what hand you’re holding the kettle with.
• Smooth interior. That is, there aren’t any bits on the inside for limescale to stick to. This should make the kettle easy to descale when the time comes.
• Massive easy-to-open lid. Enough said.
• Quick and quiet. Need I say more?
• Price. At £23.49 on Amazon, this is on the lower end of the price scale, and cheaper than the Kenwood (£28).

Flaws include ugliness and a stupid base with rounded edges which make things seem terribly unstable when returning the kettle to its station. But worst of all is the blue-light-special happening on the switch. I think Tim said it best:

The blue LED light (a relatively recent technological development, becoming widely available in the late 90s) has become the nastiest piece of tack the naughties have produced. I cannot fathom why anyone would want anything they own to glow blue, but leaving aside aesthetic preferences for now its application to kettles is just asinine. For a long while we’ve had a useful water related colour coding system: blue tap = cold, like the colour you turn when you’re, uh, cold and red tap = hot, like, uh, fire. Surely if you’re going to make a kettle glow any colour it should glow a fiery hot, angry red, like lava. Sure, if you are making an electric water cooler, make it glow blue, that would make sense. But not a kettle.

But hey, for £23.49, I feel like I got an awesome kettle. And now, I think it’s time for a cuppa tea (just one).