Not to long ago I made the decision to switch from primarily drinking coffee to drinking tea, especially in the afternoons and evenings. One of the first things that I noticed is that while most offices are equipped to easliy make coffee, tea is another matter. This is especially apparent when using loose leaf tea. This wasn't as much of an issue when I was working in a bigger office, they had hot water spickets that I could use to steep my tea of choice. However, when I moved to Stratasan and the smaller startup office, I also lost the typical hot water spicket. What was a tea drinker to do?
The first thing I tried was to reheat water using an empty coffee maker. This solution, however, was subomptimal. No matter how clean the maker seemed, there always seemed to be the slight hint of coffee in my tea. There began my search for a tea kettle I could use at the office.
After asking around, several people pointed me towards kettles like this one. As nice as that kettle is, I couldn't justify spending that much money on an apparatus whose purpose is to heat water. At the other end of the spectrum is this kettle. As you can see, there is quite a gap between these two kettles with the primary difference being that the high end kettle will automatically heat water to a specific temperature.
Luckily for me, people from long ago had a method for guaging the temperature of water. This allows me to use a cheap kettle, but also obtain the correct water temp for the tea that I'm drinking.