Why you should never use the kettle in your hotel room

You might think twice before brewing a cuppa after finding out what some hotel guests are really using their kettles for.

It turns out some hotel guests are choosing to use kettles to get their underwear clean.

You heard correct. And according to Twitter, boiling your underwear is now "a thing".

Guy 'Yug' Blomberg tweeted out: "Real question: does anyone I know clean their underwear in a kettle when travelling?"

After the strange tweet and it's crazy responses, Metro did some research and found out that, yes, this is, in fact, a very real thing across the globe.

Apparently, hotel guests are boiling their undergarments to get rid of bacteria and ensure they are ready for the next day's use.

Dr Heather Hendrickson, a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Bio sciences at Massey University in Auckland told Gizmodo: "It is super, super, super, super gross."

She also revealed that boiling your underwear does not kill all bacteria and introducing bacteria from underwear into drinking water for human consumption is potentially deadly.

"These don't cause sickness if they are consumed, but their presence in certain environments can encourage them to produce a toxin that can be deadly."

On top of this, the underwear will never get properly clean without using laundry detergent, so the gross act is essentially pointless too.

Dr Hendrickson added: "There are simply too many unknowns and hotel kettles are not industrial strength cleaning facilities."

But it turns out boiling underwear isn't even the worst thing guests have done with kettles as there were also reports of customers urinating inside them.

This article was first published on NZ Herald and is republished here with permission.