Solar Panels - use a travel kettle to save money and CO2.

cannonballdaze

If you have solar panels, use a low wattage electric kettle.

I have a 3.9 kW solar panel system. We boil quite a lot of tea, fruit tea and coffee. I bought a 1 kW Travel Kettle to replace my large 2 kW kettle.

This means that, during the day, whenever the system is generating less than 2 kW (quite a lot of the time), I save money and CO2 as, although the kettle takes longer to boil at 1kW, it uses more of my solar power and less of the power from the mains.

The savings can be significant.

I had the idea after putting a consumption meter on my kettle socket and finding out that, given energy saving bulbs etc., much of our electricity usage was the kettle.

Cheers - Joe

Apologies if this tip is somewhere else in these forums.

ed110220

cannonballdaze wrote: »

If you have solar panels, use a low wattage electric kettle.

I have a 3.9 kW solar panel system. We boil quite a lot of tea, fruit tea and coffee. I bought a 1 kW Travel Kettle to replace my large 2 kW kettle.

This means that, during the day, whenever the system is generating less than 2 kW (quite a lot of the time), I save money and CO2 as, although the kettle takes longer to boil at 1kW, it uses more of my solar power and less of the power from the mains.

The savings can be significant.

I had the idea after putting a consumption meter on my kettle socket and finding out that, given energy saving bulbs etc., much of our electricity usage was the kettle.

Cheers - Joe

Apologies if this tip is somewhere else in these forums.

Makes perfect sense. When I was in Japan noticed they had special kettles that keep the water hot after they boil and was wondering why they took so long to boil (quite a few minutes) until I noticed they were about 500W. I've never seen one here but one could be a good idea.

rogerblack

cannonballdaze wrote: »

The savings can be significant..

This seems unlikely.

At 10 cups (boiling half a cup of water a time, as many conventional kettles can do), with about 25 uses to the kWh (from my kettle measurements) - that's about .4kWh/day.
Assuming you don't have an export meter, and further assuming that the travel kettle uses 100% solar, and the normal kettle half, you'd be saving about 2p/day, or £6/year.
In real life, it's likely to be not this good. 10 cups a day is somewhat extreme for most - during the daylight hours, and this neglects days when the solar will not be producing anything, and days when it's producing >2kW.
I would be surprised if in real life anyones savings exceeded £3/year.
A saving - yes - but one of many insignificant ones that can add up.

silverwhistle

Seeing as a 3kw kettle would trip the average italian system I already possessed a 1.8kW example from Wilko and that's a reasonable compromise on speed and peak usage.