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Kitchen · Breville · 2013

Breville IQ Kettle

Five preset temperatures, a hold function, and a body that survives daily descaling.

A wide-spout kettle wins, and it cannot do pour-over — #1

Overall

8.2

out of 10

Axis scores

Kitchen is scored on these 5 axes. The total is their plain average — nothing is weighted.

Breville IQ Kettle — axis scores out of 10Horizontal bar chart of editorial scores out of 10 across 5 axes. Bars run from a shared zero baseline; longer is better. Breville IQ Kettle: Performance 8.6, Value 7.4, Durability 8.6, Ease of use 8.4, Quietness 7.8.PerformanceBreville IQ Kettle — Performance 8.6 out of 108.6ValueBreville IQ Kettle — Value 7.4 out of 107.4DurabilityBreville IQ Kettle — Durability 8.6 out of 108.6Ease of useBreville IQ Kettle — Ease of use 8.4 out of 108.4QuietnessBreville IQ Kettle — Quietness 7.8 out of 107.8Editorial score out of 10 — higher is better
  • Performance — How well it does the core job
  • Value — What the same money buys elsewhere
  • Durability — Failure and fade reports past the one-year mark
  • Ease of use — Setup, daily operation, cleaning, maintenance
  • Quietness — Operating noise — a higher score means quieter

Specs

Control
Five preset temperatures plus hold
Body
Brushed stainless
Capacity
1.7 liters

As published by the manufacturer. We didn't measure these ourselves.

Is it for you

Buy it if

  • Green tea and coffee from the same kettle, at different temperatures
  • Hard water, where descaling happens often
  • You want a stainless jug and element instead of a glass-and-plastic body

Skip it if

  • You need a gooseneck spout for pour-over control
  • Counter space is tight — this is a full-size kettle

Set 80 degrees for green tea, walk away, come back to water still at 80 degrees. Five presets get the water to temperature without a thermometer and a twenty-minute hold keeps it there, and the holding half separates a temperature-control kettle from a kettle that merely knows how hot it is.

Jug and concealed element are both stainless, and that decides the durability ordering here. Descaling means putting mild acid inside the same vessel over and over. Stainless stays indifferent to that indefinitely, while plastic collars discolour and printed markings fade. The water window and the lid are not stainless, so call this a stainless water path only where it counts.

Controls are a row of physical buttons with clear labeling instead of a touch panel, and they read at a glance with wet hands.

The spout is wide and pours fast, exactly right for filling a teapot or a pan and exactly wrong for pour-over coffee. If filter coffee is why you are buying a kettle, the shape is wrong whatever else the kettle does well.

At 1.7 liters it is a full-size kettle and takes up the counter accordingly.

Boil noise stays moderate. A concealed flat element inside a heavy stainless body damps considerably better than an exposed element in thin metal, and the gap against the glass alternatives is audible.

One complaint recurs among owners. The lid opens by button and springs back with more force than necessary.

Last updated . The scoring method is on how we rank.