Kitchen Needs

Buying a toaster sounds like the easiest decision in the kitchen. Two slots, a lever, done. But if your worktop is short on both width and depth, the shape of the thing matters more than you’d think. Some toasters are tall and narrow. Others are short and long. One of those will fit under your wall cupboards. The other won’t. We put two popular compact two slice toasters side by side to see which one actually earns its spot.

Russell Hobbs Honeycomb 2 Slice Toaster

This one is a plastic bodied toaster with a textured high gloss finish, extra wide slots and a high lift feature so you can get smaller slices out without burning your fingers. Russell Hobbs lists it at 27.4cm tall, 18.3cm wide and 20cm deep, with six browning levels and a frozen, cancel and reheat function. The crumb tray slides out from underneath.

It’s the shape that suits a narrow strip of worktop. Twenty centimetres of depth is about as little as a two slice toaster gets, so it’s a sensible pick if your counter is more corridor than kitchen. The trade off is height. At 27.4cm, check what’s above it before you buy, because some wall cupboards sit lower than that.

Good to know

It’s a plastic body, not stainless steel, so it won’t feel as solid as a pricier toaster and the gloss finish can show fingerprints. We haven’t tested one ourselves, so this is based on the maker’s own listing and spec sheet rather than our own kitchen.

Dualit 26205 Lite 2 Slice Toaster

Dualit’s own spec sheet puts this one at 17cm wide, 28.8cm deep and just 20cm tall, with a stainless steel cover, a concealed crumb tray and wide 36mm slots. It runs at 1.1kW and Dualit rates it for about 60 slices an hour, so it’s built to be used properly rather than just for the odd slice of toast.

This is the one for a kitchen with low wall cupboards. At 20cm tall it’ll slide under most shelving with room to spare. What it asks for instead is worktop depth, nearly 29cm of it, plus a bit more so the lever has room to go down. If your counter is deep but your cupboards are close overhead, this is the better shape.

Good to know

We spotted more than one listing for this exact model while checking prices, which happens sometimes with older product lines on Amazon, so it’s worth checking you’re looking at the current one before you buy. At 1.7kg it’s heavier than the Russell Hobbs too, which is no bad thing on a wobbly worktop, but it is more to lift if you store it in a cupboard between uses.

So which one wins

Neither, really. It depends on what you’re short of. If your worktop is a narrow strip and you have decent headroom above it, the Russell Hobbs Honeycomb takes up the smaller footprint for less money. If your cupboards sit low and close to the worktop, the Dualit’s low, flat shape will slide underneath where a taller toaster won’t. Measure the gap above your counter before you buy either one. It takes thirty seconds and saves you sending a toaster back.

One more thing: the pictures in this post are illustrations of what these two toaster shapes look like in general, not photos of the exact products, so the one that turns up at your door will look a little different in the details.

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