great as always, i had two of them and they work good for 4/5 years. a "must buy"

I bought this kettle on sale in Los Angeles in 1996. It has been used almost everyday ever since. I highly recommend this kettle.

I bought one of these three years ago because when someone comes to the door or there's some other distraction I have, on occasion, boiled the water too long. Because this shuts off automatically when the steam is made, this is very safe and unwasteful. I bought the new one for my mother but she doesn't use filtered water so I suppose the coils and the filter will clog up sooner than mine, but it's attractive and a little something I can do to make her life simpler and safer.

I like the looks of this kettle, it has a ball that shows the water level, and when it works it boils water relatively quickly. However, the base only accepts the kettle in a single orientation. This is a problem with the oval design of both kettle and base. If a circular power stub is in the middle of the circular base, then you don't have to get the angle of the incoming kettle just-so in order to get it on the base. Ok, so then you get it on the base and switch it on. Here you must watch carefully to see if the light goes on on the top, because it is about 50-50 whether or not you have really got the kettle properly on the base. If the light is not on then you have to jiggle the kettle until it comes on. True, we are not approaching the complexity of landing a plane, but frankly putting the kettle on should not be such a fiddly operation.

The spout has a filter, but this is good & bad. Good because you don't get bits of kettle fur in your tea (not that I've ever had this happen). Bad because you can't really fill the kettle via the spout. So you have to lift the lid every time and it's not super convenient to do that.

Final bit of this rant... er, review is that in less than 6 months of use, the kettle stopped working altogether. I am not impressed. I've used many electric kettles over the years and while this is perhaps the prettiest it is perhaps the most flawed.

Boils water quickly, but because of where the electrical contact is on the base (not centered like others), it often doesn't make contact when the kettle is placed on top, and must be jiggled into place. If you don't get it right you come back 5 minutes later to find that it never started heating...