If you have hard water, you'd know just how silly that question is. Everyone descales their kettles at some point, but we don't want to do it every other day. That's too much effort for making coffee or tea. The filter is there to extend the amount of time you can go between descaling to reasonable timescales.
I went on a similar kettle-quest a while ago and wound up accepting the disco-ball LED enhanced model because it was cheap and did the job (and mine doesn't beep - that would have immediately sent it back). I still think about going with the fancier one with a temp control for that perfect cup, but just waiting a minute for the water to come off the boil is fine enough for me.
I'm looking at that limescale filter pictured: and I don't think it helps with hard water at all.
It looks like the point of the limescale filter in the picture is for keeping the limescale IN the kettle, and preventing chunks of limescale from pouring out of the kettle and into your teacups. Anything else, it'd be utterly useless for.
A tiny metal mesh won't do anything to pull limescale out of hard water. For that, you need Reverse Osmosis and/or demineralizer. Much larger activated carbon-filters (aka: Brita) barely helps with hard water in my experience (and Youtube tests suggest it doesn't change ppm counts much at all).
(Brita clearly makes a different taste: so its filtering something out of the water. But its just not limestone / scale / the stuff that makes hard water)
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Descaling with vinegar (or citric acid tablets, or some other acid) seems to be the easiest solution, short of a more expensive, dedicated filter (like Reverse Osmosis).
You're just not going to soften hard water with a reusable mesh. That's just not how hard water works.
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IMO: That's why we don't see limescale filters on electric kettles. Physics / chemistry simply doesn't work the way the parent post expects.
> It looks like the point of the limescale filter in the picture is for keeping the limescale IN the kettle, and preventing chunks of limescale from pouring out of the kettle and into your teacups.
That's the point, yes. You have tea with lime flakes otherwise.
As for filters I actually prefer the taste of hard water (and the tap water is good to drink where I live, just inconvenient).
As for kettles - most people where I live use the ones you put on your gas stove as electricity is more expansive.
People I know with gas or induction stoves use it to boil water because it's faster. This must be doubly true in the US with it's comparatively weak power outlets.
It looks like the point of the limescale filter in the picture is for keeping the limescale IN the kettle, and preventing chunks of limescale from pouring out of the kettle and into your teacups. Anything else, it'd be utterly useless for.
Well, yeah. That's exactly what it's for. The kettle I'm using right now has one and that's exactly what it's for.
Just trying to understand your thought process here - did you think that the parent thought that the filter would somehow remove lime out of thin air? I'm honestly amazed how you didn't immediately come to the conclusion that it's just for filtering lime out before pouring.
I have been in homes with hard water, but its not my day-to-day life.
I usually use a $15 kettle, and no lime precipitates when I typically use a boiler. I can see that lime eventually builds up in the kettle, but as described earlier: a bit of vinegar removes those deposits without much issue.
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Honestly, I can't say that I've ever seen water so hard that it'd precipitate visible amounts of lime in a kettle. I usually see that sort of stuff on humidifiers or distillers. Not really a kettle.
I mean, everything eventually has lime buildup ("soft water" isn't free of lime/calcium, it just has 1/2 the calcium of hard water). Knowing how to clean that stuff off is important.
I had no idea how bad hard water could get until I moved to London.
I get limescale on everything. I descale my kettle every week or two (almost daily if not using a Brita filter), shower head monthly. I pour citric acid down the toilet weekly. My taps actually form little calcium stalactites over a few months. Thermostatic shower cartridges are an annual replacement item because the limescale gets them too.
I keep demineralised water around for sensitive equipment like humidifiers.
I use the Brita Maxtra+, and have confirmed with test strips and en electric meter that it reduces my 400ppm to 150ppm or so. Not zero, but significantly increases the interval between rescaling and results in a more pleasant cup of tea. Not sure about the others, but the Maxtra+ is advertised specifically to soften water.
However the filters do not last as long as they claim. I have to replace the filter maybe 2/3 through it’s rated life or I start to get limescale and tea scum.
I don’t drink the Brita water though. I much prefer the taste of hard water.
I get that it's fun to try to "big time" me with physical explanations for simple phenomenons that anyone who actually owns a kettle can explain, but it's very simple: the filter isn't there to provide any kind of softening. It's there to keep chunks of limescale from falling out of the kettle when you pour the water.
Yep, that's the big mystery you couldn't solve in 30 sentences. It's a strainer.
> If you have hard water, you'd know just how silly that question is. Everyone descales their kettles at some point, but we don't want to do it every other day. That's too much effort for making coffee or tea.
I have very hard water and I do it every day before I boil soft water for green tea. It takes only 1-2 minutes...
Except, in this case, we have a society where one side is spreading very deliberate, demonstrable, objective lies, and then saying the other side is lying as a method of trying to shut down reality-based conversation. We're reaching a point where some people in our society are so poorly informed that they literally cannot make decisions that will save their lives - people are actually dying because of disinformation about injecting bleach or taking chloroquine as a cure for COVID19.
We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.
But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.
The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?
Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.
I completely agree with your assessment of all of these as obvious disinformation. However, I don't think it's obvious how to stop this from happening. While I fear the effects of this disinformation and the ease with which it is spreading, I do also fear that any attempt to combat it will just put the truth in the hands of entities which shouldn't be trusted with it, such as Facebook or Twitter or some kind of government agency.
Ross's lymphoma was thought to have been caused by dichloromethane exposure from his odorless paint thinner (and him 'beating the devil' out of his brushes aerosolizing it).
It's now banned in paint thinners as a result of some pretty long lobbying efforts. It's a little sad, since chemicals like DCM are hard to replace, but if it saves the lives of our artists at the expense of them having a bit of a harder time cleaning their brushes, maybe we can live with that.
Its oral LD50 was tested to be more than 5000mg/kg according to Shepherd Color Company's MSDS for Blue 10G513 (as it is known commercially). That's well into "non-toxic" as categorized by the EPA. For perspective, that's more than ten times less toxic than caffeine.
So, probably pretty safe when used appropriately. I wouldn't go inhaling it, since any fine powder's not great for the lungs, but that shouldn't be news to anyone. Just wear your N95 when mixing dry pigments as you always should.
Isn't LD50 only relevant to acute exposure?[0] Just because you can eat 5 grams of something and survive doesn't mean repeated exposure to it in smaller quantities or in other ways won't hurt you (obviously). E.g. acute inhalation of asbestos has no recorded mortality. I think I'm missing something in your post.
It's not the LD50 for Cobalt Blue, but the LD50 for soluble Cobalt salts is between 150 and 500 mg/kg and Cobalt toxicity seems to be a thing. But the LD50(rat) for cobalt blue is > 10000 mg/kg according to the MSDS I'm looking at. That doesn't sound toxic.
Wiki says this about cobalt: "it causes respiratory problems when inhaled. It also causes skin problems when touched; after nickel and chromium, cobalt is a major cause of contact dermatitis"
So for people looking for an example of something that's somewhat toxic, but much less toxic as a paint. Here you go, Cobalt Blue. The color this new can be substituted for. yeah the toxicities are different, but it's the same idea.
There's at least 3 different manufacturers that make these things. There's absolutely no reason to point out ChromeCast over Roku or Amazon's FireStick, e.g.
It's going to be ridiculously annoying once the security professionals start finding exploits for smart TVs and have them worming around the internet - the vendors will be glacially slow to respond, if they do at all. It's going to take an act of market regulation to make them even try to patch old tvs and ensure basic functionality of disconnected tvs. Especially if this aggressive autodiscovery and autojoin stuff ever proves out, and/or they take the logical next step of throwing in a low speed cellular modem like auto manufacturers have.
We're going completely backwards by introducing cruftware into tvs that will be thrown away by the vendor in a year or two - however long it takes for a warranty on that batch to run out. Whatever it takes to sell the next TV at Black Friday I guess.
That's why standards like ETSI 303 645 exist and legislation is being created. Although most of it is around "just buy a new one when this is unsupported".
And then Tillis' (Disney) Historical Preservation Copyright Act of 2023 will make sure we won't see that in our lifetimes.
(But seriously, just look at the absolute absurdity that Tillis is trying to push through right now as an example of how broken and backward copyright in this country is. If the companies keep getting their way, there will never be a such thing as a public domain going forward.)
I went on a similar kettle-quest a while ago and wound up accepting the disco-ball LED enhanced model because it was cheap and did the job (and mine doesn't beep - that would have immediately sent it back). I still think about going with the fancier one with a temp control for that perfect cup, but just waiting a minute for the water to come off the boil is fine enough for me.