It boils water. And it looks red. Yay
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I recently picked up the same kind at a thrift store. Probably an older version. It’s great, but I don’t like that it beeps… ;-;
We’ve had an electric kettle for a while, and when it’s done it just clicks off. It’s the perfect amount of noise that I now have a Pavlovian response to haha
We have a Bosch that beeps. First I hated it. Now I love it. I can do other things and still register that it is finished.
Same, but sometimes the other thing I’m doing is waiting for it to boil so I don’t chance waking up my flatmate.
Yeah, that’s the thing with ours. If you lift it off it’s base while heating it also beeps.
I have one that looks just like this but black plastic not red. It just clicks.
I have an older version, without that snazzy red handle.
9+ years old, absolute workhorse.
Hm, seems unpractical. How are you going to lift that hot kettle without a handle?
You get used to it
thanks for picking up the slack @Cypher!
I got a really good one years ago, my wife used it to heat up chicken stock to make gumbo. Never again.
Sorry about the divorce but you had to do it, no other options
This has me fucked up. Did your coffee the next day taste like chicken?
Does boiling acid not remove and off flavors? I do that for desvaling anyway
Ugh, RIP. I’ve ruined many a travel mug with milk, but I would never do that to a kettle.
Well done, sir. And I would also say it looks red, although I don’t want to jump to conclusions.
1.7L
That’s a lot of tea
Unless it’s dirty south sweet tea. Then that’s barely a glass.
High five. You midwest. No ice means more room in the Rt. 44 cup.
Happy cake day! There’s no such thing as too much tea, tho.
Does anyone make a good kettle that has variable temps? Seems like most are on or off.
EDIT: Just gonna throw this here since a bunch of people were so helpful. Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll have to check them out and post back here once I decide.
The Fellow Stagg is an incredible kettle that does precise variable temps.
The downside is that it’s only 900ml and is quite expensive.
Hi - try the Cuisinart gooseneck kettle! Seriously, better than everything else suggested. Cheaper thank the Fellow.
Warning - the beeps are annoying. It beeps once when you turn it on once when it starts to heat up, then three beeps when it has boiled to your specified temperature. Then a final beep to turn off the base. If you have people sleeping it’s pretty annoying in a small area. I have seen YouTube videos about disabling the sound but I have not done so myself. $130 and I think it’s worth it.
It will do temperatures from 140° f to 205° f in 5° increments. And then boiling temperature 212° f of course
https://www.cuisinart.com/digital-gooseneck-kettle/GK-1.html
I have had a simpler variable temp kettle for about a decade (https://www.cuisinart.ca/en/perfectemp-cordless-electric-programmable-kettle/CPK-17C.html) which is great for tea (Why we got it in the first place). Definitely consider upgrading my cheap gooseneck with the cuisinart one.
We have a Fellow Stagg EKG for pour overs, and it works great.
If the gooseneck spout isn’t your cup of tea, it looks like they have a standard spout version too.
The prices are not for the faint of heart.
Plus, with WiFi updates, Corvo EKG Pro evolves with your brewing needs, keeping your kettle up to date for consistent, top-tier performance.
What the actual fuck…
Why does a fucking kettle need wifi? What is complicated about boiling fucking water?! We’ve been doing this for millennia.
Uh, the one we have doesn’t do any wifi. Turn the dual to set the temp and push it to heat to temp. Maybe that’s what the “pro” stuff is about? And agreed, that’s absolutely silly.
Ok, yeah, definitely had an update since we bought a couple years ago. At least it looks like the wifi stuff is for firmware updates only.
Why does a kettle need firmware?! It does one thing. Heat water. It turn electricity on when water is below a temperature.
Unless physics is getting updates on a regular basis, there is no good reason for a kettle to need anything except electricity.
I’m just throwing out there homekit integration and automation. You can open your door home from work and the kettle starts boiling. Or heats up before you get downstairs for morning coffee.
Niche, but not useless.
I know…stove plus kettle. Preferably an old kettle someone left you. Keep it dull.
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Always seems to be a tradeoff for the ability to do that. For most uses I find it does ya well enough to use a probe thermometer and water it back to your desired temperature
Yeah, that’s how I’m doing it now, you’d think someone would’ve slapped a rheostat and a calculator screen on one to let me adjust the temp…hell, may just do that myself
It sounds reasonable when ya clunk it out there, but inspires a foreboding in me as though you were going to overvoltage a CRT monitor somehow during the process
I owned a Xiaomi one years ago. Had an app and everything. It wasn’t life-changing, but it did the job.
Can’t remember anything about it, though, so this probably won’t help much in your search for one.
Probably depends on the area you live in. I am in EU and got myself a 4 temp setting glass kettle for 30eur in 2020. Some cheap no-name brand. It got battle-scarred from time. Bottom LED ring has only 2 LEDs working. There are cracks all over the plastic ring on the bottom with small chunks missing. But other than that, it works and does it’s job as if I bought it yesterday.
In the end, all of them work exactly the same so there is not exactly a much difference in some cheap ass one compared to say Tefal or similar mainstream brands. And 30 euro for 5+ years and thousands of hot beverages is more than fair in my opinion.
Mine looks like this
We use a Bosch with temperature control and ‘keep warm’. I’ve also heard Ninja make a good temp-control kettle.
Yay
With all of the stainless steel kettles offered by “Big Kettle” it’s nice to finally see some transparency. /s
Well played. Honor to your house and may your tea never oversteep.
I’m going to buy an electric kettle when my tired old coffee pot finally shits the bed. My kitchen is limited in size and is already in the grips of Too Many Small Kitchen Appliances.
What advantage does this have over boiling water in the microwave?
More energy efficient and sometimes faster, quieter (or at least a more pleasant sound imo), and just feels nicer to pour. I have a gooseneck one that can target a specific temperature that is an absolute treat to use. It’s by far our most used kitchen gadget. It’s one of those “little things” that make life better in not entirely tangible ways.
For anyone that eats instant noodles regularly, or drinks coffee made using an Aeropress or a pour-over, or making Jello, or any other application where the water must already be boiling hot before adding, the electric kettle is king.
It also avoids the quandary with having to carefully move a potentially-open top cup full of boiling water from the microwave to wherever it is needed. Some Japanese electric kettles are even fully thermally insulated and proofed against tip-over. These units require a positive actuation of a trigger in order to dispense; tilting the kettle isn’t enough.
And finally, using an electric kettle does not temporarily cause radio interference in the 2.4 GHz spectrum, with attendant WiFi and Bluetooth signal reductions.
Although it’s perhaps a little slower and energy inefficient, I can’t see spending money on a fragile-seeming electric kettle. With little kitchen space and disliking having something else to clean I am happy to continue using my 2 quart Revereware stainless steel pot. It’s been boiling water as well as cooking meals on one electric range top or another without fail for almost 40 years, a tiny fraction of it’s expected working life.
I can’t remember ever cleaning an electric kettle, other than maybe wiping the outside if I spilled something on it or if I left the apartment for two months. The kettle has the notable property of regularly being full of boiling water, which kills any germs and washes what little dust might’ve gotten into it in the meantime. And I’m regularly grabbing the handle, which is the outside part of which I could be vaguely concerned.
If you have 230v power like a vast majority of the world, it’s faster. Especially if heating over a couple of cups.
Ah, fair. I’m not plugging it into the same plug as my dryer or whatever, my home’s norm is 110-120v @ 60Hz on AC. I do have the 230-240v @ 60Hz option, but, honestly? I’m mostly on 5v/1-2A DC (I run a lot off of USB batteries).
Boiling it in a kettle or even a pot doesn’t have that weird metallic-ish taste that it gets if you microwave it.
I don’t have a microwave, and my kettle has different modes
I thought you weren’t supposed to microwave water because it can superheat or something
It’s possible but iirc any imperfection in the surface will prevent this.
So would always be moot with a tea bag I guess?
Exploding water? In a nutshell, yes, water can “explode” in the fashion described above. However, it takes near perfect conditions to bring this about, thus “exploding water” is not something the average hot beverage drinker who would otherwise now be eyeing his microwave with trepidation need fear. Odds are, you’ll go through life without ever viewing this phenomenon first-hand, and if you’re one of the rare few who does get to see it, you will likely not be harmed by the experience (that would take your standing right over the cup at the instant it happened, and the liquid’s bolting up and hitting your skin).
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has advised consumers:
This type of phenomenon occurs if water is heated in a clean cup. If foreign materials such as instant coffee or sugar are added before heating, the risk is greatly reduced. If superheating has occurred, a slight disturbance or movement such as picking up the cup, or pouring in a spoon full of instant coffee, may result in a violent eruption with the boiling water exploding out of the cup.
I always give it a stir with a long spoon before and after putting it in the microwave, when it won’t be in contact with my skin.
I love that mine has a grid of different temperatures that I can chose with a single button press. 70 for the kid’s cocoa, 80 for green tea, 95 for my French press and boiling for black tea.
I went to a store to look at kettles the other day, didn’t find any I liked, need to go to another store and look at more kettles
UK kettles boil faster than North American ones because they are plugged into 240v lines instead of 120v lines. But IIUC, you can pull the same amount of amps from either line. Why can’t we make kettles boil just as fast no matter where they are plugged in, by pulling more amps? I guess it’s the inherent resistance of the heating coil being the same? Can’t we trade something off, use more coils, “plug it in twice,” nothing??
I’m seeing that average UK socket circuits are 32A, which is nuts, I’m jealous. So that’s it right there, 32A (I know (or hope) the kettle isn’t pulling 32A) * 240v is a ridiculous amount of power, obviously more than any kettle would ever pull in a million years. My heat pumps and dryer are the only thing on the double breakers pulling 30A. Couldn’t imagine a teakettle.
That’s the max you can draw from the mains, not the single socket capacity. Sockets are wired to circuits at 13A. If you want to put a heavy duty appliance like an oven or induction hob, you put them in separate circuits with higher Amperage. Same for home EV chargers.
This is a great video about the topic. https://youtu.be/INZybkX8tLI
As soon as I started reading your comment I remembered the fused outlets of Britania. And as soon as I saw the YouTube link, I knew it was the same Tech Connections video that taught me it. I watched a video on British kettles despite being an American who drinks drip coffee.
I FUCKING KNEW IT WOULD A TECHNOLOGY CONNECTIONS VIDEO. YOU CAN’T FOOL ME, LEMMY.
One of the variables is the amount of water being boiled. For a given kettle, there is a roughly linear relationship between the mass of the water and the time it takes to heat it by a degree. If I get two kettles, plug them both in, and split the water between them, then don’t I get my water boiled twice as fast? Why can’t we just put two elements in one kettle?
Sure, that’s the BTU right there. You would think that if you had 100 equal elements heating 100 equally sized amounts of water (in a vacuum), that it’d go faster than one element heating one 100 times as large. I imagine you’d need some kind of separation between the elements, or they’d end up hearing one another and affecting their individual efficiencies. I’m sure Lemmy can design a more efficient kettle though, let’s get on it.
The loop of sockets could be as high as 32A but most appliance plugs are fitted with a 13A fuse.
A British kettle will pull around 3kW. What splits the wheat from the chaff is how quietly it’ll do that, for the most part. Fancy ones will let you pick a temperature, too. Tea is 100°C and poured straight on the bag, coffee is a wimp and cries bitter tears at such a high heat.
I’ve had friends from Northern Ireland (though anywhere reserves the right to claim proper tea making method) that will fuck you off if you take 10 seconds from the stop of the kettle and the contact of hot water to the teabag.
I wish I could have gotten my new kettle with metric temps instead. Really jazz up my kitchen.
Ha, me and my family are from Jersey (New), but if you go up the chain on my mom’s side, they’re all tea drinkers from mainly southern Ireland, but some north too, and they like it piping, piping hot, to the point they will microwave it if its unsat, and with milk. Black tea, steaming hot, milk.
I drink drip coffee, black, a few drops of stevia, the closer to lukewarm the better so I can chug it down quickly. Because I’m from the east coast of the US, we’re all about efficiency. An anecdote I like to tell people is when my brother moved to SF in 2009, we noticed Dunkin Donuts’s slogan was not “America Runs on Dunkin’” out there, it was “America’s Favorite Coffee,” and we surmised it was because, on the left coast, folks enjoyed the experience more, weren’t in as much of a rush; whereas, on the east coast, and specifically NYC and it’s surrounding areas, it was much more go-go-go, where coffee was seen as more of a utility. I do think it’s changed a bit since, though.
So the reason you can’t just “add more amps” is US wiring standards. Most houses have 15 or 20A circuits. This puts an upper limit on the amount of wattage a single circuit can pull of either 120x15= 1800W or 120x20=2400W. This is going to be the biggest bottleneck, since going above this rating will either trip your breaker or light the cables on fire in your walls.
Beyond that, most plugs in homes are NEMA 5-15 outlets, which also limits the output of a single plug to 15A. If a manufacturer wanted to use a NEMA 5-20 plug to get that extra 5 amps, you’d need a different receptacle and thicker wiring to safely use it. Since most people don’t have 5-20 plugs, there isn’t really a reason for manufacturers to make them.
All of this is why pretty much every electric kettle made to work with the US electrical system is slower than ones made for 240V systems. Also, they all take about the same amount of time to heat a specific volume of water, so cheap ones are going to do just as good of a job as expensive ones.
All of these same limitations apply to space heaters as well, since they are essentially doing the same thing.
e=i*r. the coils are usually quartz coated nichrome alloy, which has a resistance based off length and diameter. so to get more amps, you just need more volts. as long as the circuit is basic (no electronics) that’s just fine. however, most are rated for 110-240 or so volts, so it is only realistic in the us, and would require replacing the plug.
Can I use two kettles to boil a quantity of water in half the time that one kettle will do it? And if so, why can’t I make a “double kettle”?
I have a double coffee pot, so why not. Maybe someone already makes one?
Still, amperage on a single outlet is usually limited by the circuit breaker, yours might pop if you plug in two kettles. 120v double outlets in the us often have a little breakaway tab so you can wire the top plug into a separate breaker from the bottom plug. I actually have one like that downstairs at my place.
Stoves and ranges often have high wattage hookups. They also often host electrical outlets. Seems weird there are no high speed boiling devices that exploit it.
my ascot 1.5 liter boils cold water in 7 minutes or less. that is quite a bit, enough to speed up ramen and coffee. much faster than a quart cup in the microwave. not enough to make a full thermos of tea in one brewing though, and definitely not enough to brew a full gallon of tea at once. a better pot would be more than twice the size, and need more power to brew as quickly.
I get the appeal, but I think cost and counter space would be limiting issues. of course, what annoys me isn’t the seven minutes, but the small size. then again, a gallon of boiling water in a heating unit is going to weigh too much.
however, I don’t think i’d put two boilers on the counter just because I make too much tea.
faster would be slightly more convenient, but would push the price up (not that there aren’t outrageously priced regular water kettles.)
I think it is like most other appliances: they use the nominal 1500/1875 amp target because that’s what a lot of 110 infrastucture peaks at.
Trading off to pull more amps is not really feasible. Power is the work done, the product of voltage and current. This is what (watt) is being delivered to the water, ultimately. You can achieve this, in a very basic sense by either increasing the voltage or the current. However, a quirk of material interaction with electricity is that it is the current draw and the resistance that have a heating effect, I²R. However this is in every conductor, including the ones you have packed in behind your walls. This also means that if you deliver too little voltage to a product designed to pull a certain load (a given amount of power) it will make that power up instead by drawing more current, and hopefully only destroying the product, which I hope is cheaper than your home.
Additionally, your point about doubling the voltage is correct. If you took a live feed from breakers off both sides of your “split phase” distribution panel, that would actually mean you were delivering 240VAC @60Hz to an appliance, at the loss of your neutral line (frequency interactions are another consideration to an item) but many ships around the world work happily without a neutral line.
This is all very basic a way of looking at it. My apologies, I’m tired and not a teacher.
Good explanation tho.
The moment I understood that I belonged here is when I look at a post about a kettle and immediately go
“oooh…that is friggin’ nice!” with no one else in the room with me.
You belong. That squid kettle belongs in my kitchen, though, mail it to me, I don’t care if it doesn’t like my national voltage.
I just got this excellent cephalopod kettle that additionally heats water to specific temperatures. Saves me from having to add one medium size ice cube to my coffee.
Don’t buy SMEG. I was hoping its build different but its built the same with other electronics, to maximize profit. Won’t last 7 years, dont expect it to pass on to your kids.
