I’m a member of a “BUY NOTHING” Facebook group. Most people don’t know how to fix stuff so it’s a good place to pick up quality appliances for free (not cheap, FREE – as in “buy nothing”). I already have a nice kettle at home but wouldn’t mind having a quality kettle at work, so I jumped at the opportunity to pick up a kettle that retails for $45 – a Myland ETS1712.

I would quickly discover these things are built around very common components, with the only differences being in the “product design” of the kettles – my unit is laid out very similarly and in some ways identically to this kettle and also this kettle, those blogs of which I found while researching my repair. That first blog I found via searching for the T125 thermostat switch, which I also very nearly impulse bought from AliExpress – “Only $2.55 + shipping!” – but am glad I didn’t because the fix wound up being something already in the unit that just needed tweaking.

I took the above picture *after* I began unscrewing that center terminal, so the screw wasn’t loose or anything – that’s my fault for not taking a proper “before” photo but I also didn’t want to forget my steps…

OK so I wound up unscrewing and resetting *both* of those terminals, but it was the outlined-in-red one that was the culprit, ultimately.

If you can imagine that part is simply a flat disc on top. The disc needs to touch a component in the kettle base that routes to the switch which is what the human uses to “turn on” the circuit. The component in the kettle base is just a rod, the rod in the center circle of this part:

That’s a fairly precarious relationship. The “rod” part was effectively not marrying or touching the disc in the base switch… It was off by just a few millimeters, but that was more than the rod could compensate for, so the circuit was never completing…sigh. So simple, but also so annoying, because this design flaw likely leads to thousands of kettles being discarded annually.

Back to the part in the base switch:

It took fiddling with two times, having to reset and reposition/realign that leg of the bendy bit that has the disc on the tip, so that it aligned with the ‘rod’ in the kettle itself, but eventually they re-marry, and then the thing turned on:

Don’t overthink it like I did. I was suspecting the T125…or the thermostat base switch…or or or… but it wound up just being the two parts that clearly needed to “talk” to each other weren’t touching. They’re very small, fragile, and fell out of alignment. Most regular customers would think the appliance is “dead” but it’s nothing major…nothing a multimeter’s continuity setting couldn’t help me deduce 😉

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