When I moved house last year, my husband and I spent a night in our new place before the move was completed - this included the kitchen equipment. We brought the kettle with us but had nothing else! Desperate for at least some breakfast, and a late snack, we purchased a few basics in Tesco's to see us through - 2 mugs, teaspoons, and this Tesco Value 2T07 toaster. At £4.47 it's almost disposable. We planned to use it for a night or two and then relegate it to the cupboard as a spare (as we already have a nicer stainless steel toaster).

We didn't expect much from the Tesco Value 2T07 and to be perfectly frank it's a good thing too. The box was very plain with the Tesco Value branding, and what you get inside is the toaster and the instuctions.

The toaster is very basic as you'd expect in white plastic, with a white cord and plug. It has a fairly flimsy feeling dial and loading catch in a grey plastic along with a cancel button, and has no actual branding on the toaster itself. There is a red LED type light on the toaster which lights when in use. The toaster has four little rubbery feet, meaning it doesn't move around too much on the worktop. The cord itself is actually quite short - a bit too short really unless you are literally plugging it in right next to the socket, it wasn't a problem for us as we were in an empty kitchen but if you only have one or two socket locations in your kitchen this might be a problem, and I wouldn't recommend using an extender in a kitchen (point to note; I bought the Tesco Value kettle back when I was a student and it also had a very very short cord, so this might be something that's the case with all Value products).

When you first use it, it smells strongly of burning plastic - this worried us (and ruined the first two pieces of bread we tried to toast), but it goes quite quickly and it's most likely the 'newness' burning off. It hasn't done it since.

We put in two pieces of regular medium sliced shop bought Kingsmill, however the bread even though it was a standard size seemed to be too big for the toaster and subsequently only about 60% of the length of the bread was toasted. It was toasted OK, but then we needed to take the bread out, turn it upside down, and toast it again, just to get the whole slice toasted. So the overall toast is quite uneven as the top is less toasted than the less of the bread.

Toast time therefore is quite slow, though taking the toast out was quite easy as it stuck out a good inch and a half even when in the toaster!

Once the butter and jam was on, of course, it was OK, but overall it would drive me nuts if this was my everyday toaster. I am glad that I spent the £20 more for a decent toaster, and would only recommend this to someone on a seriously tight budget, or maybe for travel, say in a caravan, or for a student. For a budget item it just about does the job and for under a fiver it's not going to break the bank, but I was glad we only had to use it for two days at most, given that I usually use a better one.

Overall, I'll give this 2/5 as it's really not that good, but for the money, it serves a very basic purpose, and it looks OK if a bit cheap.