How do you boil water....

[tyred]

No obvious advantage to using an ordinary kettle on a gas stove IMO. But with regards to energy, boiling 1 Litre of water will require 4,200J of energy regardless of how you supply that energy.

 

[alecstilleyedye]

surely the whistle of the kettle is all part of the ceremony of the tea making…

 

[User482]

No obvious advantage to using an ordinary kettle on a gas stove IMO. But with regards to energy, boiling 1 Litre of water will require 4,200J of energy regardless of how you supply that energy.

Yes, but a lot more energy is lost using a hob.

I can't see why you'd keep a hob kettle for emergencies - what's wrong with a saucepan and lid?

 

[Amanda P]

An electric kettle for me but I seem to remember hearing that it takes as much electricity to boil a kettle as that to power your electric lights for a whole evening. No stats on that though.

Applying a little back-of-the-envelope science here...

My office kettle is rated at 2 kilowatts. That's 2000 watts. It takes about a minute to boil a cupful of water.

A minute is 1/60 of an hour, so I make that 1/60 hour * 2 kw = 0.033 Kilowatt-hours.

If I run the lights in my livingroom from when I get home (about 6pm) to when I go to bed (about 10pm), that'd be three forty-watt bulbs at one end of the room and one hundred-watt bulb at the other*, making a total of 220 watts (or 0.22kw) for 4 hours.

That makes 4 hours * 0.22 kw = 0.88 kilowatt-hours.

So my lights use about 26 times the amount of power that my kettle does.

If I had fluorescent bulbs in the living room, that'd be about 15 watts at each end of the room, so 4 hours * 0.03 kilowatts = 0.12 kilowatt-hours - still more than three times the power used by the kettle.

But if I filled the kettle, it'd need about three minutes to boil, and then the energy consumption would approach that used by the lights. And if I were wasteful and left lights on all over the house...

* The living room lights have dimmers, and so won't work with low-energy bulbs. One day, we'll sort this out. Having looked at these sums, it probably ought to be sooner rather than later. The low-energy bulbs would save about 0.75 kwH a day. It wouldn't take that long to recoup the cost of some bulbs and new switches... Hmmm...

 

[Amanda P]

I'm suffereing from Arch's disease. Supposed to be working, but anything and everything else seems more interesting, more fun and easier to do than what I'm meant to be doing.

It's this thinking. It's really hard work, you know.

 

[Chromatic]

Stove top one, similar to the one Mrs Mort would like but a slightly different shape and stainless steel not anodised, so only slightly similar.

 

[Arch]

I'm suffereing from Arch's disease. Supposed to be working, but anything and everything else seems more interesting, more fun and easier to do than what I'm meant to be doing.

It's this thinking. It's really hard work, you know.

I had a burst of thinking this morning! Sadly, the main result was a list of all the other things I need to think about.

BTW, when I was looking at links for low energy bulbs last week, I saw some descibed as dimmable. I'm assuming you know about them, and they aren't compatible for some reason?

 

[mondobongo]

We have an electric kettle and again only boil what we need, this is probably diminished by the fact that the kettle has fancy leds in it which light up the clear panel, purple when its off and red when its being used.

 

[Arch]

We have an electric kettle and again only boil what we need, this is probably diminished by the fact that the kettle has fancy leds in it which light up the clear panel, purple when its off and red when its being used.

My sister has one like that, and it has a filter, so that you can only put so much in at a time and then it has to drip through...

 

[barq]

Like tyred, I hardly ever drink tea or coffee so don't use much boiling water. However my kettle is a cheap cordless one.

Most people I know with a stove top kettle are American. But they often have really big hobs with large burners which, in my limited experience, are quicker to boil than the UK equivalent.

 

[Rhythm Thief]

I used to use a gascatcher kettle, left over from the days when I lived on a boat with no mains electricity. Now we have an electric kettle, and when the woodburner's on, we have a kettle on top of that all night, which is normally enough for a couple of hot water bottles and a cuppa before bed (or before work, in my case).

 

[Globalti]

We put a saucepan of water on the boiling plate of our Aga, of course.

(The luvley green Aga wot we got off Ebay for £ ridiculously little)

 

[Night Train]

Is it a 42 inch plasma kettle?

With Ambilight to match the mood of the brew!

 

[Lardyboy]

Stove top with one of these.

 

[derall]

I'd be stuffed in a power cut. Well, unless I got my camping stove out...

We had a power cut last week - workmen from EDF managed to bollox up the local sub-station and the whole village lost power. And yes, we were well stuffed. I found it particularly difficult 'coz I had to take my insulin and couldn't check how big a dose I was dialling up Was still in the cycling doldrums at that point so didn't even have my cycle lamp to hand. Oh, and Gas CH has electric timer so that went out too . Walking along the roads in total darkness, cars can't see the pedestrian crossing, I couldn't see holes in the pavement or bollards - even though I walked down the road thousands of times and should know them by heart. Made us realise just how much we take the power for granted.

Two days before everyone finally got power back.

As to the kettle...
Sis has an Aga so uses a stove-top kettle, I stick with an electric jug kettle