I had a bit of a result with the Amazon Vine programme this month.   When I got the list of products to choose from, there was a kettle on there.  I had recently noticed that our kettle was dribbling a bit, which annoyed me somewhat, but not enough to go out and get a new one.  The kettle on offer was the Breville VKJ137, and here is what I thought about it.

Only two things are essential for a kettle: it needs to get water to boiling point and it needs to pour that water out without dripping or spilling anywhere. Anything else is either a bonus, or unnecessary, depending on your point of view.

Every kettle I have ever had managed to boil water, but not all have poured well. My previous kettle (also a Breville) developed a dribble from its rounded spout. This one has a pointy spout and behaves perfectly well.

So, the fundamentals are fine, what about the extras?

This kettle boils very quickly, especially if you are only filling it as much as you need. It also has a safety feature, which I have not tested, whereby if you try to use it empty it cuts out instead of blowing up. Having seen a kettle blow up when somebody forgot to fill it I am comforted by this.

The spout has a filter inside, which traps limescale and can be removed for cleaning.

The most obvious feature of this kettle is the lighting. It has an LED light which the manual is very keen to point out uses hardly any electricity at all, but on the other hand it cuts out after 20 minutes of inactivity so you don’t feel you are wasting power. I’ll take their word for it – I don’t think our kettle gets left for more than 20 minutes.

You can choose what colour the light is in standby mode, to match your kitchen colour scheme. Or clash with it if you like. At the moment I am going with white. When you turn it on the colour changes according to temperature, starting blue and working up to red when it boils. The light is a gimmick, but a harmless one.

This boils quickly, pours well, and looks good.

Our old kettle was brushed steel rather than shiny, which I prefer, so I think it looked a little better, but what is the point of looking good if it fails to pour properly?  The old one also had a temperature display, which was nice, though a bit redundant as the colour also changed as it got hotter – but it didn’t have the option to change the standby colour.  Not that there was a standby colour anyway – the light only came on when you turned it on.