Boiling water

ProDave

I think you will find the cost of boiling the water for a few cups of tea each day is insignificant compared to the energy needed to heat your home in winter.  Being eficcient will chip a little off your bill, but is lost in the noise compared to the energy price rises recently.

Ultrasonic

ProDave said:

I think you will find the cost of boiling the water for a few cups of tea each day is insignificant compared to the energy needed to heat your home in winter.  Being eficcient will chip a little off your bill, but is lost in the noise compared to the energy price rises recently.

How big the financial and environmental benefits will be will obviously depend how much energy is currently being wasted but this is firmly in the well worth doing category to me. Small changes also add up so let's not discount them.

JohnSwift10

ProDave said:

I think you will find the cost of boiling the water for a few cups of tea each day is insignificant compared to the energy needed to heat your home in winter.  Being eficcient will chip a little off your bill, but is lost in the noise compared to the energy price rises recently.

Exactly, I used a monitor on my kettle for a day and boiling 2 cups of water 5 times a day and 2 full kettles twice a day used slightly less than 1 kW of electricity. 

Ultrasonic

JohnSwift10 said:

ProDave said:

I think you will find the cost of boiling the water for a few cups of tea each day is insignificant compared to the energy needed to heat your home in winter.  Being eficcient will chip a little off your bill, but is lost in the noise compared to the energy price rises recently.

Exactly, I used a monitor on my kettle for a day and boiling 2 cups of water 5 times a day and 2 full kettles twice a day used slightly less than 1 kW of electricity. 

I think you meant 1 kWh there, which is not an insignificant amount. About a quarter of my total daily electricity use in fact.

Benny2020

Got my usage down to around 1000 kWh (from the grid) now or just under 3 per day, the solar panels help of course.

facade

Ultrasonic said:

BUFF said:

No, but a lot of (most?) electric kettles have a minimum level requirement which may be 500ml-1000ml so you could potentially be heating a lot more water than you actually need.

I use a graduated jug to measure my 300ml rather than weighing it. Alternatively, one could just fill one's cup & decant that into the kettle.

I do exactly the same with a measuring jug  .

I wonder what proportion of kettles in use today don't allow people to boil so little. The defining difference is I think whether a kettle has a flat bottom or a exposed coiled heating element - the latter needs to be covered with water and so sets a minimum fill level.

Fast boil cordless kettles have a spring in the base that lifts the kettle up and stops it connecting if there is "insufficient" water to weigh it down.  My old kettle wouldn't work with 300ml of water, the current one will.

wild666

A lot of kettles have the heating element under the base of the kettle but still say that the minimum amount is 500ml, roughly one pint, in the past I have had no problem putting just one cup of water, roughly 300ml, in the kettle and boiling the water as the rule was to cover the element that was boiling the water so with the element under the skin if the base it makes no sense to boil 500ml when you only need 250 to 300 ml of water

Benny2020

You can buy vacuum kettles now that keep the water hot between uses or you can just pour whats remaining into a vacuum flask you already have and then put it back in the kettle when you next need a cuppa.

Ultrasonic

Benny2020 said:

You can buy vacuum kettles now that keep the water hot between uses or you can just pour whats remaining into a vacuum flask you already have and then put it back in the kettle when you next need a cuppa.

Both of those options will use more energy that just boiling exactly the right amount of water each time.

I frequently boil as little at 150 mL of water in my kettle actually, when making cous cous or custard.

Benny2020

Isn't the temperature that the water starts from relevant?