What is it with almost all temperature-controlled kettles being so expensive? A temperature sensor and PCB don't cost anywhere near that much, and that's the only meaningful difference with a non-temperature-controlled kettle...
@anthropy The thing is that Blokker, prior to their demise, had a temperature-controlled kettle at basically the same price as a normal kettle would be, as a standard part of their offerings (they sold it for years). So clearly it's financially possible.
As far as I can tell, it seems to just be "oh you like tea, then you must surely be willing to pay a massive markup for this feature" and nothing else...
@joepie91 the cost of a regular kettle is so low because they're produced in absurd volumes. once you get into temperature control the volume drops and the price goes up accordingly. the extra BOM cost is not that relevant.
@joepie91 yeah, if they've got the existing brand relationships to get market penetration to sell them at volume then it'll be cheap. it's 100% a volume game though.
same thing with toasters. they're cheap because they're manufactured in the tens of millions of units, to the point where there's a whole market of toaster control ASICs and those chips are all any toaster uses these days.
@joepie91 thing is, from a money perspective, it doesn't make much sense to sell a temperature controlled kettle at the rough price bracket as your lines of cheap kettles, because the added cost means lower profit margins (albeit marginal) and higher complexity means more warranty returns. so to offset that they tend to get sold at a higher price bracket, as a luxury good rather than a basic product. you *can* do it as a cheap volume sale, but it's a bit of an odd duck.
@joepie91 I've owned two temperature controlled kettles and they both failed within 3 years. one cost over £100. and we barely ever used the controlled temperature features.
the basics kettle I bought for £6 as a student worked for 15 years before it developed a minor leak. we paid a little more (£20) for the replacement to get one that matched our kitchen colour scheme, but it's still basic and works perfectly.
from an e-waste perspective I'm fully sold on keeping it simple.
@gsuberland I did have one temperature-controlled kettle that failed within 3 years. I replaced it with another (the Blokker one), and although it did experience a problem after some 3.5 years, it wasn't in any way related to the temperature control - it was rusting around the spout.
I don't know, I'm not really convinced that they're particularly more prone to failure on a fundamental level. Temperature control isn't *that* complex either.
@joepie91 the temp control system isn't usually the part that breaks. it's either the buttons or cheaper materials used to offset the higher BOM cost.
@gsuberland Right. The Blokker one has capacitive buttons. Not something that is likely to break (despite my misgivings about those types of buttons in general).
@gsuberland (On a related note, the Blokker kettle is literally available on AliExpress, just without the Blokker logo and packaging (and possibly with less QC). So it's not like they did some major engineering effort to produce a high-quality product.)
@joepie91 "possibly with less QC" actually doubtful. a ton of products sold in the West are just whitelabelled Asian-market products, and the Western distributors don't do extra QC. it's the same in all product verticals from kitchenware to test & measurement. BK Precision whitelabels Chinese brands like Maynuo and applies a 300-500% margin on top.
@joepie91 if you've ever wondered why a company's support seems to have absolutely zero insight on the internals of their own products it's usually because they're just a whitelabelling distributor. they have no engineers, it's fully logistics and marketing.
@joepie91 I'm guessing they're not expensive if you look at e.g chinese sites, but the imported ones are because they're not sold as much, so keeping stock of them is expensive (and there's brands like philips that just loves charging you hundreds of euros for simple variations on heating appliances)