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Comment by waqf | Hacker News Reader

What you call a "regular kettle" is to us a hilarious archaism.

I am English, and was partly mimicking the parent who used "regular kettle" to mean "stove top kettle."

I did grow up with one though. My parents had previously lived in a house with a very small kitchen with no convenient place for an electric kettle. When they moved they kept their stove-top kettle until it burned through (about 10 years) and replaced it with an electric. I bought a stove-top kettle a few years ago for the same reason. It still comes out occasionally when an electric kettle breaks (which is quite often if you live in one of the "hard water" areas of Southern England.)

"when an electric kettle breaks (which is quite often if you live in one of the "hard water" areas of Southern England.)"

The trick is to every now and then turn the kettle on with no water in it. The calcium on the spiral at the bottom of the kettle will break into big chunks and fall off, if you just turn the kettle up side down they will fall out and you'll have a heating element as good as new (don't let it get too hot obviously, as that will damage the heating element and/or kettle itself).

You can also use vinegar to remove the calcium.

Yeah but it takes way longer if you need to remove a thick layer of calcium. What you can do is put in vinegar and then turn the kettle on. It improves the effectiveness of the vinegar, but it gets all frothy and stinks up your house. Also if you are are with your face over the kettle when you open it, the vinegar steam or whatever it's called stings in your eyes. So personally, my money is on turning the kettle on with no water :) (well actually my money is on buying a calcium filter, which is what I ended up doing in the end, but apart from that :) )

That will remove limescale from the heating element. Unfortunately some of it also finds its way into the auto-cutoff mechanism, causing it to switch off prematurely (or occasionally fail to switch off.)

There is a better way: just boil 100-200g of citric acid in a kettleful of water. It will dissolve the limescale with no damage to the heating element.

American versus British language is like that in general.

But Americans do seem to speak as though their ways were universal, more than other nations. I remember a Canadian who worked near the border expressing her amazement at being asked "do you take normal money?"

Americans, to an absurd degree, are rabidly ethnocentric. I'm not sure why this is; I think it has to do with being the major superpower during the global information explosion era.

I'm speaking as an American myself: I have a very hard time, despite being conscious of it, not thinking of all things American as a baseline for normalcy. I know, intellectually, that American dialects stagnated for centuries after being imported from Britain and eviscerated by Webster, but I still think of "colour" as a foreign and exotic spelling.

... except where gas is cheaper than electricity.

I suspect one of the reasons for the popularity of small electrical appliances in Britain is that electricity is traditionally cheaper than gas, which is the opposite of what you'll find on mainland Europe.

> [in Britain] electricity is traditionally cheaper than gas

Rubbish, electricity is around 3x more expensive per KWh than gas in the UK. The UK has traditionally been a big gas exporter, too.

Electric kettles are used for convenience (faster, turns itself off) rather than financial reasons. Most people have little clue about what contributes what to their energy bills, too.

Presumably they are slower in the US because of lower mains voltage (x Amperage).

Reminds me of ordinary bikes.

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