To earn its keep on my cooktop, a tea kettle must do three things:

Be as easy to de-scale as it is to fill. This rules out those ridiculous kettles with only a spout.
Be easy to pour. All of those "helpful" kettles whose handles wobble? OUT. Double-ditto for those ones that leverage gravity so that tilting to pour releases the cap on the spout.
Alert me to the doneness of water. What the hell's up with those whistle-free tea kettles? I mean, the non-electric ones? At least with those, you can't burn the house down. A little "ding" is fine under those circumstances.

Were you to view my own tea kettle—13 years mine, like the apartment—you would see it is missing the half-functional, half-decorative knob atop the cover. This is because when it broke, a mere year after I bought it, and I wrote off for a new one, the company informed me there was no way to obtain a replacement. Planned obsolescence, just like its higher-end cousins. Shameful.

I drink a lot of tea—just ask my dentist—so I have searched high and low for a kettle that meets these criteria, at any (reasonable) price. No luck, so same old kettle. So I've just had to use a pliers around de-scaling time, and adopt a wabi-sabi attitude about the rest of it.

Still, when such a small thing to fix is the first thing a company jettisons? Shameful.

xxx c

This is Day 16 of a 21-day series. For more scoop on the who/what/why, go here.