Electric Kettle Baby Hazard

My youngest kid is at the stage where she tries to eat anything that she can get her hands on. When we open the closet, her eyes light up at the sight of the deliciously dirty vacuum cleaner nozzle! We therefore have to keep our home “baby-proofed,” but we have one habit that is particularly dangerous.

An unfortunately common problem with many Japanese residences is that there are too few electrical outlets. This leads to quite unsafe use of outlet splitters, as well as extension chords when there is not an outlet where you need one.

I have seen many surprisingly poorly designed apartments over the years. The apartment where my family and I currently live is pretty good—it was the best that we could find when we moved last. There is one place where two doors open into each other, and the kitchen has a really bad design. There is a place next to the sink that the designers probably imagined putting a refrigerator, but our refrigerator opens from the left and putting it in that location would not allow us to access the inside. We therefore have to put the refrigerator in a different place, unfortunately yet unavoidably creating dead space, and we have to use a (high-amperage) extension chord to power it.

There are three outlets in the kitchen, but one of them is taken up by a gas alarm. We tried removing that gas alarm once, but the loss of power triggered the alarm, resulting in a repeated alert at the entrance of the apartment building! We therefore have to make due with two outlets, and we do not use outlet splitters because they power high-amperage kitchen appliances.

Electric kettles are devices that use electricity to heat water for domestic use. They are extremely popular in Japan, where they are often used for making tea, coffee, and baby “milk.” Some models are designed to keep water hot, so that you have hot water available at any time, while other models are design to heat water as quickly as possible when it is needed. My wife and I use a T-fal electric kettle that heats water quickly, and we store the hot water in a thermos.

There is not a good place in our kitchen to use our electric kettle. The gas alarm uses the outlet that we wish we could use. There is a very narrow bit of counter at the edge of our sink where would can barely sit the electric kettle, and we can plug it in if we unplug the microwave oven, but that is pretty inconvenient as well as hazardous. We have therefore gotten into the habit of using our electric kettle in our living room, on the floor.

It is pretty easy to remember to keep the baby away from the electric kettle while we are using it. The baby hazard is actually when we are not using it! We move the kettle to the kitchen, but the base plate remains. The base plate is shaped like a breast, complete with an electric nipple, so it is no wonder that our baby is really interested in it! We have tried to remember to always move the base plate to the kitchen after use, but my wife often forgets such things. I have ran over and quickly removed it just before the baby reached it multiple times. I once came into the room to find the baby sucking on that electric nipple, but the base plate was thankfully unplugged.

I am now trying to convince my wife that we cannot afford the convenience of using it in the living room until the baby gets bigger. It is way too dangerous! We have to use the electric kettle in the kitchen for now. If we cannot get used to that, I think we need to put it into storage and heat water the old-fashioned way: on the stove.

Note: I prefer to avoid Google links, but I used one in this blog entry because it is the only search engine that produces relevant results.