Small Kettles to save energy

kah22

Does this sound sensible? My electricity is raising by 21 percent in January so needless to say I’m thinking of ways to save energy.  

I live alone and one possible energy saving idea I was thinking of is buying one of those little one litre type kettles you’d find in an hotel room. Would that be a money saving buy? I see them advertised on Amazon for about £20 - give or take.  Of course I’d still have my standard kettle if I needed more water.  There is quite a footfall through my door!

Kevin

LaHostessAvecLaMostess

kah22 said:

Does this sound sensible? My electricity is raising by 21 percent in January so needless to say I’m thinking of ways to save energy.  

I live alone and one possible energy saving idea I was thinking of is buying one of those little one litre type kettles you’d find in an hotel room. Would that be a money saving buy? I see them advertised on Amazon for about £20 - give or take.  Of course I’d still have my standard kettle if I needed more water.  There is quite a footfall through my door!

Kevin

No.  It takes the same amount of energy to boil a cup of water in a big kettle as a small one, give or take.

Don't boil more than you need if you want to be sensible.

I appreciate that there are kettles that do 2 cups minimum vs 1 cup but I suspect the cost of buying a new kettle just to be able to boil only one cup massively outweighs the cost of the energy that's been saved.

Reed_Richards

It is easy to overfill a large kettle and boil more water than you need so it having a small kettle stops you doing that you will save energy.  A typical kettle consumes 3000 W so to keep one boiling for an hour would cost you about 65p.  So you would need to save around 30 hours of kettle boiling to cover the £20 cost of a small kettle.  If your small kettle saved you half a minute of large kettle boiling time than it would pay for itself after 3600 boils, so in about a 10 years if you only used it once a day.

These are very rough estimates.  If you can manage to boil exactly the amount of water you need in your large kettle then the small kettle would offer no savings at all.    

kazwookie

Any left over boiling hot water in the kettle you have now, pour into a thermos flask and use during that day.

Try to only boil the amount of water you need, don't fill the kettle more than 1/4 full.

JJ_Egan

Suppose an LPG kettle could be cheaper .

Gas is cheaper than electric if you can use gas .

QrizB

LaHostessAvecLaMostess said:

kah22 said:

Does this sound sensible? My electricity is raising by 21 percent in January so needless to say I’m thinking of ways to save energy.  

I live alone and one possible energy saving idea I was thinking of is buying one of those little one litre type kettles you’d find in an hotel room. Would that be a money saving buy? I see them advertised on Amazon for about £20 - give or take.  Of course I’d still have my standard kettle if I needed more water.  There is quite a footfall through my door!

Kevin

No.  It takes the same amount of energy to boil a cup of water in a big kettle as a small one, give or take.
Don't boil more than you need if you want to be sensible.
I appreciate that there are kettles that do 2 cups minimum vs 1 cup but I suspect the cost of buying a new kettle just to be able to boil only one cup massively outweighs the cost of the energy that's been saved.

There was a thread about this in the main "Energy" forum here.

My kettle is a supermarket own-brand full-size model. It's minimum volume is 0.5 litres which just happens to be the same size as my two-cup teapot   but if I wanted to boil a single cup for eg. instant coffee, it would be 2x what I need.

Boiling it costs about 1.22p (see this post). If I was to have a kettle that boiled half as much water, it would save me 0.61p per boil. If I drink ten cups a day, that's 6.1p a day or £22.26 per year.

(I probably do drink ten cups a day, perhaps more some days, but as mentioned my teapot holds two cups.)

QrizB

JJ_Egan said:

Suppose an LPG kettle could be cheaper .

Gas is cheaper than electric if you can use gas .

Mains gas is 5x cheaper but a pan on the stove is probably only 50% efficient, so you're still saving 60% on the cost, provided you don't boil too much water. And the waste heat goes into the room so it's not really "wasted" at this time of year when you'd have the heating on anyway.

coffeehound

The diddy kettles tend to be low power, perhaps a quarter the power of a 3-pint kettle, so you'd be waiting four times as long each time you boil (and losing heat during that time as well).  That could be a deal-breaker.

victor2

JJ_Egan said:

Suppose an LPG kettle could be cheaper .

Gas is cheaper than electric if you can use gas .

But gas kettles tend not to be as efficient as electric ones and take a lot longer to boil, so use more energy than you'd think.

Been discussed before over the years, but using figures from an experiment I did in 2012 and today's typical standard energy rates, boiling 1 litre of water in a 2KW electric kettle would cost 2.17p and in a kettle on a gas hob would cost 1.17p.

So going by those figures, you could save 1p per litre boiled if you don't mind waiting twice as long for the kettle to boil. Have to be boiling a lot of water to reduce your energy bills by anything significant.

canaldumidi

Do you live in a house or a flat? If house, you'd do better to spend the £20 at Wickes on loft insulation and add another layer to whatever is already there.

Ebe_Scrooge

As per previous replies, the size of the kettle makes very little difference in practical terms, the key thing is to only boil what you need.  As long as one cupful of water will cover the element or base of the kettle, that's all that matters.

Now, here's a thought - and I'm genuinely curious about this.  If you want to boil just a cupful of water, is it more efficient to stick a cup of water in the microwave?  Obviously, you're then boiling precisely the amount you need.  Now, I know the "input" wattage of a microwave is usually higher than the "output" wattage, so some energy is being lost somewhere along the line.  But I've no idea if it would be more energy efficient overall?  I suspect not - if you can actually pour a cupful of water into an empty kettle and use that, I'm guessing that would be better?