Comment by maccard
2 months ago
In the US. In the UK 2200W induction plates are readily available with a standard plug for ~£40, or if you spend a little more you can go to 3kW - [0] which is about the limit of most domestic circuits but is hotter than most gas hobs.
If you _really_ want more than that you can go a little mental and use one with an integrated battery which can push out 10 kW [1]
[0] https://www.nisbets.co.uk/nisbets-essentials-single-zone-ind...
This begs the question, and I've genuinely thought this before, of why we don't just strap a battery to a kettle and end this silly debate. If it takes 5 minutes to boil a cup of water in a 1000 watt kettle, that's somewhere around 80Wh... I guess it would be kind of expensive, but couldn't you make a pretty fast kettle with some number of high discharge battery cells?
(Well honestly, I guess the real answer is outside of Internet debates most people probably just don't consider 5 minutes to boil a cup of water to be a problem.)
It would turn an inert device that costs a couple bucks to manufacture and has affectively no usage limit into a bomb that costs a couple hundred bucks (due to lack of economy of scale) and is limited by the battery's rated number of cycles. The battery's proximity to the heat source wouldn't help.
If people are willing to rewire their homes for kettles, I guess a couple hundred bucks isn't that bad.
> limited by the battery's rated number of cycles
Obviously the battery should be replaceable. (It should be in most electronics, really...)
> The battery's proximity to the heat source wouldn't help.
That doesn't seem like a particularly tricky problem to me. The standard kettle already tries as hard as possible to insulate the heat. If you were really worried it'd be possible to put the battery on a separate power brick instead probably.
...
And I guess I could've solved my own problem by googling it. There are tons of battery kettles on the market, including a 1500W one by Cuisinart and a 2200W (apparently?) unit by Makita. The latter is predictably expensive but the Cuisinart is available for around $100 where I live, which is definitely pricey but seems plausible.
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People that care about the time it takes to boil water just have an instant hot water boiler on (or under) their bench.
It's probably just the price of batteries. You can definitely do this and you'd need like 8 18650 batteries, which today you can get on amazon for $30 USD. A decade ago it might have cost $200-$300.
Given that premium kettles already sell for about $100, there's definitely room for an ultra premium kettle that boils water laughably fast for $150.
Impulse Labs is doing exactly this..
I believe there master plan foresees a future where batteries are more integrated with a house for decentralized grid storage. But the additional consumer advantage is better hardware - i.e cooking time.
That seems a terrible waste of batteries to me. A boiling water tap seems like a better idea to me - electric heater with a pressurised insulated vessel that just dispenses from your tap.
I've seen those around, even with an integrated carbonator to get sparkling water right from the tap. They're neat but also ridiculously expensive
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