Comment by jchw
3 months ago
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.
The only one I found that was truly battery-powered was the Makita [0]. The $99 Cuisinart I found seems to be a standard electric kettle. Lots of kettles describe themselves as cordless but that does not mean battery-powered; it just means the kettle itself can be removed from a corded base.
I also found a ton of AI-generated link spam pages purporting to be about battery-powered kettles that are all clearly not battery-powered (e.g. [1]). Some of these are 12v powered, but they still contain no batteries. Apparently the adjective cordless confuses AI just like it does people.
Side note: Boiling water takes a lot of energy. You need a big battery; not just a couple of AAs. Any truly battery-powered kettle is going to require a battery at least as big as one for a contractor-grade power tool, and that battery is going to deplete after roughly one boiled pot.
[0] https://www.acmetools.com/makita-40v-max-xgt-hot-water-kettl...
[1] https://activegearreviews.com/best-battery-powered-kettles/
> Obviously the battery should be replaceable. (It should be in most electronics, really...)
This is super wasteful when we can just hook up a heating element to an insulated tank and keep it hot like Quooker [0] does. Assuming the 3L tank, that would mean probably 20 minutes to heat the tank if it's entirely emptied for the US, but that's how long it would take to boil that water with an electric kettle _anyway_. If you want 5l of water for cooking, you cna use your 3L tank and fill it up with the "slightly lukewarm water that keeps coming through the tap", and then put it on the hob _anyway_. In the best case you're boiling 2L of water instead of 5 anyway.
> 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.
Dunno what kettle you're using but no kettle I've ever used has been insulated. They're either plastic, or stainless steel. They do usually have a lid, which helps.
[0] https://www.quooker.co.uk/tanks
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I'm in the midst of a kitchen remodel (in 120V land).
I decided to pull an extra 240V line to the countertop explicitly for a tea kettle, which I have not purchased yet but seem to be available from Amazon UK for ~2x the price of an ordinary US-market kettle.
The most disappointing thing so far is the short list of kettle options that ship from the UK to the US.
Also not sure if I should get a UK receptacle (this would probably offend the bldg inspector, so I might swap post-inspection), or just rewire the kettle itself with a standard US (240V) plug.
FWIW, the extra wire + breaker cost was about $100. I expect to pay another $30 or so for the receptacle or appliance wire, and a bit over $100 for the kettle (and its replacements every few years). Not the least expensive option, but not too bad.
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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
https://www.quooker.co.uk/ - these are the only "boiling water" ones (as in 100 degrees C), but if you're ok with 98C, then you can get https://www.screwfix.com/p/swirl-danube-3-in-1-instant-boili... instead for 25% of the price.