Friday, January 19, 2007

Product endorsement.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the Sunbeam Hot Shot, retailing at around $20 USD:

It will heat a cup full of water to boiling in about the time it takes to put in a tea bag and measure out some sugar and slide the cup in. Fill tea cup with water, flip up lid, pour in, and hit the on button. It shuts off automatically when it boils. Push dispense and the hot water runs into your cup.

I got a new one today. My old one has gone to the great tea-room in the sky. I'd had it for seven years and made approximately 13,000 cups of tea with it (that's about five cups a day, which is less than I often drink but allows for days I wasn't home). The guts were still good - heating coil, thermostat, and switches, but the plastic casing had given up the ghost. The buttons were getting kind of wonky and when the lid fell off last week, I intended to continue using it but the husbeast went out and bought me a replacement. Now I'm good until 2014.

If you drink tea, you want one of these.

12 comments:

Bells said...

I drink tea. I want one.

See, it worked!

Good price too.

April said...

Is it boiling boiling or just hot? And is the timing based on using cold water or lukewarm water? This may replace my microwave tea kettle.

Catie said...

i have a tea kettle for the job - I drink a lot of coffee. I used to have a one cup coffee maker - I would just not put coffee in it and presto wammo I would have hot water for tea. But for the discerning tea maker I suppose this wouldn't be very good as it is not boiling...

April: did you really post that early in the morning!? wow.

Julie said...

I use cold water out of the spigot. In winter it does take a little longer, but still not terribly long. It uses a thermostat. You need to put in fairly cool (room temperature or colder) water to reset the thermostat, and then it heats to a rolling boil (boiling boiling) and shuts itself off.

If you've got lime in your water, you need to run vinegar through it ever three thousand cups or so, to remove the lime deposits. That WILL slow down how fast it heats water.

Of course with this method, if you accidentally hit 'on' while it's empty, you have to either unplug it or quickly dump in some water, or it will burn itself out with no water there to register 'hot'. But like I said, the old one made thirteen thousand cups and the guts were still going strong, so the system works.

sienna said...

Gotta get me one of these! I have so much tea that I can't fit it all into one drawer.

NeedleTart said...

Bad Blogger! Enabling. I have such small counters anything I put on it must multi-task (DH's coffee maker is another matter).

Alwen said...

"...if you accidentally hit 'on' while it's empty, you have to either unplug it or quickly dump in some water, or it will burn itself out with no water there to register 'hot'."

That would be me. :( "Can't Boil Water" Woman.

A pity, since I've been a tea drinker ever since my English-war-bride great-aunt addicted me to Assam tea with milk & sugar at the ripe old age of about 3-1/2. Assam w/milk & sug. is still a comfort "food" for me after all these years.

If I can manage to boil the #@$ water.

Anonymous said...

How did you hear of this beauty? I want one for my little basement bedroom!

Netter said...

I had one in college. It was great.

Terby said...

Where did you find a new one? I had one in college, and used mine for about 7-10 years before it went kablooey. I miss it.

Julie said...

This one was ordered on-line through Amazon's kitchenware store, but you can go to the Sunbeam web site and do a search for stores in the area. I think I bought my last one at K-Mart.

And my word verification is "ggbdqs". Is this anti-spam, or a dyslexia test??!!?

Unknown said...

You're right, I do want one!