Jacey Bedford's Journal

I read on the wonderful internet that slugs don't like coffee grounds so I've been religiously saving my coffee grounds so I can sprinkle them on the front garden - which is slug paradise due to the previous house owner thinking crazy paving was a neat idea. I figure at best it will sent the slugs screaming into someone else's garden and at worst add a fine layer of coffee-compost to the weed infested border.

But you can't sprinkle the damn stuff until it is dry and I haven't quite got the 'how to dry out used coffee grounds' thing yet. The first container was too tall and narrow. The second was doing fine until we had an influx of visitors who went through two bags of beans in a day and I ran out of container-room.

And, of course, it's been so wet that I haven't been able to bring myself to go outside sprinkling coffee grounds in the rain. Maybe that's just as well... after all the fact that coffee grounds deter slugs is only a theory.... Perhaps I'll go back to putting them in the compost - the coffee grounds I mean, I think the slugs get themselves into the compost and anywhere else they fancy.

But while I'm thinking about beverages... our kettle is on the blink. I'm disappointed as I don't think we've had it for a year yet, but I'm not surprised. Best Beloved must switch it on twenty or thirty times a day for cups of tea - and not always with a carefully measured amount of water in it either. So in the interests of saving the world (and our electricity bill) 1 kwh at a time, I've just ordered a "Tefal Quick Cup" which boils one cupful of water from cold in three seconds.

According to the specs it doesn't quite get the water up to boiling point so I'm not sure that best beloved will take to it for tea-making (he is from Yorkshire, after all and even has a habit of switching the kettle on a second time if he's left it to go off the boil for a few seconds), but friends in the USA have one of those built-in hot water on demand thingies and he reckons it's not so bad for teamaking. I'll let you know.

While we're testing it out I'll try to recall where i bought the old kettle. I'm sure it's still under guarantee. It was either Sainsburys or Asda.

The Tefal one cup water boiler thingy arrived today. (Full marks to Amazon for speedy service, no marks to me for forgetting to tick the free delivery box and ending up paying an extra five quid for next day delivery which I did not need.)

It uses about as much power as a kettle but boils a cup of water in about 25 seconds. You have to stand with your finger on the button while water spurts through the spout a dribble at a time. It starts coming through virtually immediately but it takes a while to fill your cup. Boiling water for one cup in the kettle takes one minute forty seconds. (Okay that's not strictly speaking just one cup of water in the kettle because you have to have a minimum amount in there.)

Verdict. You get a cup of tea for a quarter of the power usage. The water is not quite boiling but it's hot enough to satisfy Best Beloved. If you wanted enough water for a pot of tea you might get fed up of standing there with your finger on the button, but since most of our tea-drinking is individual cups I think I can live with that.

I'm hoping this will make a real difference to our power usage. I don't think best beloved realises how much power his constantly boiling electric kettle has been using. Time (and the next leccy bill) will tell.