Kettle Design

This blog has sat here empty for some 10 years or more while my writing abilities, insomuch as they ever existed, have atrophied. Certainly some of that procrastination was occupying myself with other things. And certainly more of it was trying to be sure I knew something well, and that whatever I knew was in some whitespace someone else hadn’t already written about, and then figuring out how to contribute that to the collective discussion.

I suppose I’ve given up, or taken heed of the advice to just write something.

And given the world is in the throngs of fascism, positivity is hard to come by, the global economy seems to be teetering, and AI is crowding out most of what preocupies our minds, it’s easiest to just muse about my kettle.

I have a kettle. It’s a Bonavita 1L Gooseneck Electric Kettle which lets you precisely set what temperature to heat the water to. It’s one of the common recommended kettles for people making filter coffee, which is why I bought it and have used it near-daily for 10 years or so. I don’t think I expected to have any design complaints about a kettle, even a temperature-specific one. I’m a fairly picky software user, but when it comes to real-life things like kitchen gadgets I would have liked to think of myself as easygoing.

And yet I realize I’ve built up quite a list of little papercuts for this little kettle, so here we are. Undoubtedly someone will teach me that one of these is user error, that one is unrealistic to manufacture, that one is unrealistic to manufacture at the price point (side note: I don’t believe I paid anywhere near $99 10 years ago…). And I bet someone will teach me one or more violate laws of physics.

For reference, if you didn’t click the photo above, the kettle is a somewhat standard looking kettle. The base has a temperature display on it, and six buttons:

  • a “Temp Set” button for cycling through preset temperatures
  • power
  • - and + for decreasing and increasing the temperature by individual degrees
  • a hold button, which when on will keep the liquid at the configured temperature (and when off will simply heat to that temperature and then turn off)
  • an F / C toggle for switching between Celsius and some other system

Complaints — onward I go; I have nine.

Leading with the most baffling one to me — the base cannot be turned off when the kettle is not seated on it. I can’t describe how confusing this has made me over the years. You heat some water, bring the kettle to the living room, come back to the kitchen, realize you left the base on and have no way to turn it off without going to get the kettle. For the life of me I don’t understand this, and have always thought I must be missing something and if I recited an appropriate incantation that there must be some way of getting it off, but no, not that I’ve seen. Obviously I generally keep the base plugged in and can unplug it to shut it off if need be, but I have been surprised at myself for thinking that this misfeature alone is almost enough to make me want to replace it.

It will also stop heating if the kettle comes unsettled from the base. Either I have a ghost or the kettle has become quite temperamental over the last few years, because on quite a few mornings even slight vibrations will make the kettle come unseated as it’s heating up. This tends to make me feel like one of those “useless box” toys, the ones that turn themselves off again, you know? I’ll turn the base on, turn around, and turn back around to see instead of heating the kettle has gone to 0 00 display, and have to jiggle the kettle, turn it back on, only to repeat the cycle with it only heating up a few degrees each time.

Close behind those are that even with the kettle in place, you cannot turn it off without turning it on again. By which I mean, with the base on and kettle seated, in order to turn the base off, you have to actually hit the power button twice — once to turn the kettle on for heating and the second press finally turns it off. So every morning after using the kettle I get to double tap the button to get it off. Except of course if you don’t notice that the second tap wasn’t registered, the kettle will happily heat itself up, including if it has nearly no liquid in it.

Which brings me to: it has no detection for being empty. It will quite happily attempt to cook itself even if there’s no liquid in it. When there isn’t any it’ll just begin to make worrying popping sounds after around 15 or 30 seconds as the metal inside expands, usually alerting me that it’s unexpectedly on.

There’s no detection that the lid is not seated correctly (or off) either.

It irks me that the F / C button is the same size as all the other ones. Surely you press that once to set it to your measurement system of choice and then essentially never again. Making it the same size as buttons you press nearly every time you use it, or in the case of the temperature adjustment buttons at least every few weeks, is just… unsatisfying.

It came with an ugly waterproof cover which covered everything on the base except for the heating element underneath the kettle. The cover lasted 8 years before I inexplicably lost it. Absolutely nothing seems to have changed in the 2 years since, the kettle has done fine with light splashing from the sink, so I don’t quite understand if it is or isn’t hypersensitive to liquid or not, which the cover had made me believe.

It certainly doesn’t seem to retain heat well. It’s a kettle, I get it, not a thermos. But when you take it off the base and hope it holds water somewhat warm for refilling your tea you find the temperature drops incredibly rapidly.

The outside metal on the other hand gets hot enough to burn you if you accidentally touch it. Seems like if it would have had double walls both of these would be more reasonable.

And while it’ll remember the last temperature you set thankfully, it will not remember whether you constantly use the hold functionality or not. My typical routine in the morning is to heat the water for making coffee, go about cleaning up a bit, and then come back when it’s at temperature. So I always want it to hold the temperature after hitting what’s set, particularly because with the poor heat retention if you clean for a few minutes and come back you’ll find the water has dropped 10 degrees or more.

But nope, that makes every morning three button presses at minimum — once to turn it on, once to get it heating, and then a tap of the hold button to make sure it stays at temp.

I am of course not a designer, just a humble (or not so humble) coffee hobbyist. So I plow on, not annoyed enough to look for a new one. It’s hard after all to predict whether some other expensive kettle has its own design warts, or fixes these ones, and it’s been good enough after all.

Though maybe not getting this blog up and running was the kettle’s fault. Make it 10 complaints.