A little while back I wrote about a kitchen timer offered by Kikkerland. It is a rather large flat black timer that you can stick to the fridge, and then you manually rotate a clock arm to set the timer. The idea seamed intriguing enough that I bought it to try out, and here are my thoughts.
First of all the good points. It is a unique design and will no doubt garner some attention and comments from guests. Also, after having problems with other kitchen timers and their magnets not sticking to metal, there is no question this one will stay put. There is also something strangely appealing about turning the dial as opposed to pushing a button a bunch of times. I don’t know what it is, I guess it simply gives some tactile satisfaction when it is least expected. And kids will probably love to play with it too.
With that said, if you are looking for a functional timer, this is probably not the one for the kitchen. Here are some of the limitations with this product.
- If you need anything precise (under three minutes), it probably won’t be that accurate and you might be 5-20 seconds off depending upon your ‘timer touch’ when setting it. Of course, that isn’t a problem if you set it for 30 minutes as those seconds are relatively insignificant, but for smaller periods of time this manual error can be more important. I did test it with a digital timer at 10 minutes and they both rang within five seconds of each other, so that was fairly good, but go with digital when you need precision.
- The sound of the alarm was very weak, in fact the ticking is almost louder. And the ring duration is very short — about one second. To make it a bit more problematic, after the ringer goes off, the clock keeps ticking for another two minutes. Though the package warns that this will happen, if you miss the weak sounding alarm, you really wouldn’t know until the timer stopped completely that it had rung at all. You have to be around to monitor it and you can’t be off in some far corner of the house and expect to hear it.
- The ticking is quite loud and you feel as though you are in some TV drama or an episode of 24. When that timer is turned on, you are on the clock, and I imagine some will not like this sound while cooking.
- Setting the timer is a bit strange. It didn’t take long to learn and the instructions on the package tell you what to do, but you have to turn it past zero first, let it ring, and then set it to the time you want. Once I set it for two minutes and failed to do this and it didn’t ring at all.
All in all, the timer scores points for being a unique design, but it is better suited for keeping track of timeouts for your kids than it is for keeping track of your pasta. In fact, I would recommend this timer for that purpose. I know that my daughter would love to play with the dial and the numbers are easier for kids to read. Plus, the ticking would be another reminder that a timeout was in progress.
If I were to think of a cooking use for it, it would be for keeping track of time within a set time. By that I mean, if you are already cooking a dish and need to add an ingredient and cook it for five minutes before adding something else, or you need to cover something for only ten minutes, then this timer can be useful. The ticking will remind that you should be monitoring your dish, and you don’t need to keep starting and stopping other timers.
If you have a need for this type of ticking reminder, want a children’s timeout clock, or just want a unique design, then this tmer is worth consideration. You can purchase this item at Kikkerland.
