It boils water. And it looks red. Yay
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But does it need an app?
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
I have one that looks just like this but black plastic not red. It just clicks.
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 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 don’t think water is supposed to look red when you boil it.
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.
Well done, sir. And I would also say it looks red, although I don’t want to jump to conclusions.
What would be really cool, is a kettle which has an alarm if the water is cooking. Some really high pitched noise so that everybody hears it. But the battery would probably die on that pretty soon. Hmm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a version of this kettle with temp selection. Not variable but buttons with various temps is about the only thing I’ve seen other than just on/off full boil.
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.
I know…stove plus kettle. Preferably an old kettle someone left you. Keep it dull.
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.
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
We use a Bosch with temperature control and ‘keep warm’. I’ve also heard Ninja make a good temp-control kettle.
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
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.
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.
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
I FUCKING KNEW IT WOULD A TECHNOLOGY CONNECTIONS VIDEO. YOU CAN’T FOOL ME, LEMMY.
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.
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.
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
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.
