Kettles are supposed to be the easy bit of a kitchen. Then you buy one and it turns out to be the size of a small dog. If your kitchen is more corridor than room, a smaller kettle makes a real difference.
Here are three kettles that hold around a litre, from brands that have been making kettles for a long time.
The Cookworks Compact Kettle
Cookworks is Argos’s own-brand kitchen range, and this is about as plain as a kettle gets: a 1 litre stainless steel jug kettle with nothing extra going on. No swivel base claims, no digital display, just something that boils a mugful or two and then gets out of your way again.
Good to know
The listing we checked confirms the capacity and the stainless steel body but doesn’t give a wattage or boil time, so check the full product page for those details before you order one.
The Dualit Mini Lite Kettle
Dualit’s Mini Lite Kettle, model 72200, holds 1 litre in a smaller, rounder shape than Dualit’s full-size kettles, with a polished body and black trim. It comes with a washable limescale filter, which matters more than it sounds. Scale build-up is what kills most cheap kettles early, and a filter you can rinse under the tap saves you descaling every few weeks.
Good to know
Different listings for this kettle give slightly different wattage figures, somewhere around 2kW, so don’t take the exact number as gospel until you’ve checked the current listing. Either way, it’s built to boil fast for its size, not slowly.
The Breville VKJ472 Compact Kettle
The VKJ472 is Breville’s take on the same idea: a 1 litre, 1.8kW jug kettle with a concealed heating element and a base that rotates the full 360 degrees, so it doesn’t matter which way round you set it down or which hand you pour with. Breville’s own pitch is straightforward. A smaller capacity means you’re not boiling far more water than two cups need, which also means less standing around waiting.
Good to know
A concealed element is easier to wipe down than an exposed coil, but we couldn’t find Breville’s full descaling instructions on the pages we were able to check, so look that up in the manual before you let limescale build up.
Which one, if you’re choosing
None of these are for a houseshare that needs six mugs on the go at once, that’s what a 1.7 litre kettle is for. But if you’re usually making tea or coffee for one or two people, a smaller kettle boils faster, costs a little less to run each time and leaves more of your worktop free for everything else you actually need it for. Go for the Cookworks if you just want the cheapest, plainest option. Go for the Dualit if you want something that looks a bit more considered and is easy to descale. Go for the Breville if you want the rotating base and don’t mind paying a little more for it.
A quick note on the pictures in this post: they’re illustrations of what this type of kettle generally looks like, not photos of the actual products, so whichever one turns up at your door will look a little different in the details.
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