While traveling through Europe, most AirBnBs had electric kettles and they all had gross scale deposits in them so I ended up boiling water in a pot.

You clean that by boiling vinegar and water, takes 3 minutes.

Adding a little vinegar and water and boiling it will often remove most of the scale. Maybe hard when you're travelling, but at home it works fine.

Citric acid is commonly used in Germany.

With the added bonus it (imo) smells better. In the US, you can usually find it with pickling supplies or in the cleaning section as coffee pot cleaner

It's calcium. It won't hurt you, and you can't taste it.

Will it also make my bones stronger? Where does it come from? Was it in the water to begin with?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_water

Yes it was in the water to begin with, that’s what hard water is.

Ahh right, hard water, thanks.

Don’t know about your bones but all tap water has some minerals in it.

Good thing too, because if you drink demineralised water it pulls electrolytes out of your cells (I think by osmosis) and eventually you also end up with decreasing bone density.

Most tap water is far from being demineralised. It's a problem if you have a reverse osmosis filtration system though.

You can definitely taste it.

If you care about energy efficiency, you should descale your kettles every so often.

It's not even hard, just boil a solution of 1/2 white vinegar + 1/2 water, and the CaCO3 (+ 2H(+) from the vinegar) changes back to Ca(2+) + CO2 + H2O You can even see the bubbles from the CO2

It's pretty inconvenient when you are in an unknown location on a hotel. But yes, some areas of Europe has very hard water.

For making coffee or tea, soft water is preferable.

For drinking straight up, hard water tastes better. At least to me. Perhaps because that's what I grew up with in central Europe.

Btw, the Romans also built their towns preferably in places with hard water.

I come from a soft water area and I prefer the soft water for drinking. Our water cooker never needs vinegar, it's just not getting the residue :-)

I'd recommend using citric acid instead, they sell it here as "lemon salt" so it comes in an easy to use salt shaker. I usually put it in the minimum amount of water required to safely boil it and a small amount depending on how heavy the deposits are (usually up to a spoon is enough for me), though you could also just pour it in and wait.

It works really well and doesn't leave the same smell. When I'd previously used vinegar I'd had to boil another round of water and throw it away just to clean the kettle from the vinegar itself, but with citric acid there's no need (just don't drink the citric acid, it tastes like acid :)).

Do you recommend citric acid over vinegar just because of the smell?

I use vinegar all the time, put in something like 50 ml to the remaining hot water just after making a tea. After a few minutes you can just rinse it and let it evaporate, 5 more mins and the smell is totally gone.

> You can definitely taste it.

If it gets deposited, it means that it’s not in the water any longer, or at least the concentration in the water has lowered. What you can taste is already in the water before you boil it and does not come from the kettle (well, in kettles that have been used normally with normal water).

If it bothers you, just boiling a bit of slightly diluted vinegar will get rid of it.

> If you care about energy efficiency, you should descale your kettles every so often.

Yes, these are terrible at conducting heat.

I'd gladly take an electric kettle over what I had to use the last time I was in an American hotel room to heat water, which was the bedside drip coffee maker. Water heated through that still tasted like bad coffee.

Throw some white vinegar. Boil. Rince. Clean.

Agreed. Someone gave us ours as a wedding gift. I thought, “Great. More clutter I don’t need.”

I use it daily for tea and coffee (Aeropress). And now, thanks to this thread, I may use it to speed up my pasta water boiling.

I'm American and learned about electric kettles during trips to Asia. They are definitely handy, even at 110V. We make our daily coffee in a French press, so the electric kettle is a no-brainer.

> We make our daily coffee in a French press

Moka pots are much better. Your French press will start letting the coffee powder through at some point. I use these: https://www.rommelsbacher.de/en/coffee-tea-co/espresso-maker....

I don’t like to force things on people, but I usually buy people Moka pots. Moka pots ARE better but they make a different coffee. Moka pots are an espresso machine substitute more than a French press substitute.

I do recommend it though. Lots more options for coffee drinks.

You can't compare a moka pot with a french press, they are fundamentally different things that make different styles of coffee. Espresso and coffee are not identical.

Personally I find french press too grainy, so at home I use aeropress, but when out prefer a properly done pour over filtered coffee. Black of course.

It’s part of my bug out bag. You can cook with that thing and one bowl.

I have a pretty nice electric kettle. You can set it to a number of common tea temperatures and it'll hold that temp for up to a half hour. I got it as a wedding gift. I use it about weekly.

If it broke tonight I don't know that I'd bother replacing it tomorrow. I'd probably go a while before I got another kettle. It might even take someone gifting me one before I bother getting one.

Sure, it's marginally faster boiling water than my stove. It's about as fast as my microwave (which is insane at 1650W). It's definitely more efficient, but the break even on that is measured in years probably for even a cheap kettle and decades for this fancy one I have.

I just don't really drink many hot drinks and my microwave does just about as good of a job for getting things hot.

https://www.cuisinart.com/shopping/appliances/tea_kettles/cp...