Best kettle

Heedtheadvice

Ah yes but...

.we are looking at this upside down  or something.

I prefer real leaf tea to bags and incidentally select Yorkshire tea to my shame.

I mention this only because quality costs and ethics has a place in tea!

So made by the pot full with 7g of tea gives 4 mugs. That's, for accuracy sake, about 40 per 250g bag or approx. 160 cups. That gives 1.6p per cup at tonight's online price.

Compare that to a pot in a cafe at say £2.50.....or even a single cup of coffee at Stirbucks or Costit.

So I avoid those two on ethical grounds, not meanness I assure you....well just a little......but happily pay to boil a kettle and think I am saving nearly pounds per pot ot mug.

Oh ethically.......oh bother I am money saving!

QrizB

For anyone tempted by one of those "instant boiling water" taps, BBC Radio 4's Sliced Bread show did a spot on them today. I thought it was quite interesting.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027jxf

charles_b_2

QrizB said:

For anyone tempted by one of those "instant boiling water" taps, BBC Radio 4's Sliced Bread show did a spot on them today. I thought it was quite interesting.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027jxf

I heard that too.  Qooker suggested 7 mugs of tea a day was the break even point where it was more efficient than a kettle, whereas the sliced bread expert reckoned it was 23 mugs.  The cost versus a £20 kettle (or less) makes this a dubious benefit. Instant hot water brings convenience but is yet another thing that chips away at people's patience. 
 In the same way as yelling 'Alexa, switch on the lights' is -to me- the height of ridiculous laziness. Just get up, you'll get exercise too 💪😉

Martyn1981

I agree Charles. Also, I'm still using my 1kW travel kettle (actually me second, the first lasted 10yrs). The idea being to better match spare PV gen, and import less.

I now have batts, so not really needed, but I assume the lower power helps an ickle bit with the battery balancing, but more importantly it makes 1 cup, whereas some kettles need more to meet the minimum, or simply for the level to be visible on the scale(?)

2.2kW kettle gets used very rarely, when visitors are around, but makes for a great reservoir to refill the travel kettle.

[Yes, I'm aware the savings/benefits are tiny, but it's fun.]

EricMears

Our 1kW kettle 'died'  and has been replaced by a 1.5kW model.  Still within output capacity of the battery system whereas to use a 3kW would need almost everything else in house turning off or importing some expensive daytime power.   Our 3kW kettle is still available for topping up when mains water fails (alas that's not unknown) or if we ever desperately need a lot of boiling water in a hurry.

NedS

QrizB said:

For anyone who's baffled by this thread being bumped, I linked to it over on the "Energy" forum

Updated calculations (for boiling half a litre of water) based on the current Ofgem cap:

• Electric kettle: 0.059kWh @ 24.5p/kWh = 1.446p
• Gas kettle: 0.1243kWh @ 6.24p/kWh = 0.776p

Saving from using gas kettle = 0.67p per boil

Cost of a gas kettle = £10 approx

Number of uses to break even = 1500

Quantity of tea* drunk by me = 5 pots a day

Time to break even = 300 days

I've had my gas kettle since September 2022 so I'm definitely in profit by now!

* It's not all tea, in the morning some of it is coffee. The kettle is also used to boil water for other purposes in addition to tea/coffee.

@QrizB really interesting to read your comparisons.

I similarly have a whistle kettle which I boil on our RangeMaster that runs on an external propane cylinder. Our propane is more expensive than natural gas (around 14p per kWh) which means for us the price to boil by gas vs electricity is pretty close. However, during the heating season we still boil by gas to take advantage of the free heat generated, and I drink a lot of tea each day! In summer it's back to the electric kettle, making sure the sun is out and not hiding behind a cloud.

For anyone on natural gas, it seems a no brainer to boil by gas during winter as the excess heat from kitchen burner is probably a more efficient heat source than the ~85% efficient gas boiler that is throwing heat out the flue.