Comment by jchw
3 months ago
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
It doesn't have to be insulated like an insulated water bottle or anything, plastic is good enough for this. I have a cheap 120V kettle, nothing special, probably mostly plastic but with some superficial bits of stainless steel. After bringing a cup of water to a boil you can safely touch the base and anywhere on the kettle itself; there's not even an obvious sign of warmth anywhere except for the lid. If you don't believe me, I do have a thermal camera, but I assume this can be reproduced with most kettles, since it's not like mine is anything special.
Also: a hot water tank is just another type of battery. If it's really well insulated, it might work pretty good, but the self-discharge rate is probably still a lot higher than a lithium ion battery. If you aren't using boiling water every day this seems like it would be very wasteful.
I don't see anything terribly wasteful about the concept of putting batteries in a few more things. They're very recyclable, and already extremely abundant. It's not necessary, but neither is pushing several kW through a kettle just to get water to boil a bit faster. So really, that might be worth interrogating first...
> It doesn't have to be insulated like an insulated water bottle or anything, plastic is good enough for this.
Yeah I agree, but I was responding to the point of: > The standard kettle already tries as hard as possible to insulate the heat
Which isn't true at all. They make a token effort.
> Also: a hot water tank is just another type of battery.
You're technically correct, the worst kind of correct.
> don't see anything terribly wasteful about the concept of putting batteries in a few more things. They're very recyclable, and already extremely abundant. It's not necessary, but neither is pushing several kW through a kettle just to get water to boil a bit faster. So really, that might be worth interrogating first...
It takes ~320 kJ of energy to bring a litre of water from room temp to boiling, no matter what way you spin it. The difference between pushing 1500w or 3kW into the hot plate is "how quickly do you get to boiling", and has basically no bearing on the total amount of energy used to boil the water. Running a 1500w kettle for twice as long will use the same amount of energy, from the same source.
Using consumable li-ion/alkaline batteries to supplement that energy is _terribly_ wasteful - we've been through the "reduce reuse recycle" loop already with waste, lets not do the same thing with rare earth metals to avoid running a single cable to household appliances.
1 reply →
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.
Personally I would just wire some NEMA 240V outlet and then have a separate adapter with a pigtail of that receptacle type and a workbox with the UK receptacle. It's a little unwieldy, but it puts the questionable hackery outside the realm of the building inspection at least.
Whether it's actually safe I though, that I am curious. Obviously the kettle can get the 240V potential it expects, but the neutral is center tapped out of the split phase transformer, right? Not sure how people wire this. (Doesn't the neutral wind up having to be one of the hots instead?)
Hmm, yeah! I hadn't thought much about the differences between UK and US 240VAC service.
In the US, it's 240V 60Hz, split-phase with center-tapped neutral, and an independent ground wire.
In the UK, it's 240V 50Hz, single-phase with independent neutral and ground.
Frequency difference should be within design tolerance. and if my EE memory serves, the phase difference should be acceptable -- just measured from a different zero reference point. The neutral from the wall would be unused, and the ground would be wired as usual.
I'll think this through thoroughly though, I was definitely glossing over those details, so thank you!
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No need to rewire anything - just get a universal plug adapter for NEMA 6-15P (or whatever your kitchen outlet is going to be) from Amazon, plug it onto the UK plug of your kettle, and Bob’s your uncle. (The building inspector doesn’t need to even see your kettle and plug.)
That does sound like a much better idea, thank you!
The molded, sealed plug of a UK kettle would fare much better in a wet kitchen environment than an aftermarket plug you'd manually install (moisture can get inside and corrode the terminals and connections).
I agree. If I replace the wire, I'd get an assembly with the correct US molded plug (NEMA 14-30?), and perform the wire replacement inside the kettle itself. Your reason is good, but I'd do it that way for the aesthetics alone. :)