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Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

It does seem that truly quality design has fallen on hard times in the consumer market.

For example, I'm looking for a kettle with temperature control. All I want is a kettle with a dial on it, that I can turn to set the appropriate temperature. Maybe a button to control whether or not my kettle will maintain that temperature once it has been reached.

No lights, no Star Trek control panel, just a kettle with a dial and a switch.

Has been impossible to find.

Appliances without needless lights are also very hard to come by. The modern aesthetic seems to lie somewhere between "70's sci-fi spaceship" and "plastic Christmas tree"

Doubly so for WiFi routers. Ugh.

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I feel the same about induction cooktops. They all come with crappy electronic control boards and can only regulate approximately in 20 degrees Fahrenheit steps with an internal temperature probe.

I just want one without the control board that just turns on and off, so I can put a proper temperature control with an external sensor in front of it. Nice for melting chocolates, brewing beer, sous vide. Seems impossible to find, unless I look at "pro" kitchen stuff for restaurants that are super expensive. It's maddening.

I love my OXO kettle for this very reason:

https://www.oxo.com/categories/coffee-tea/brew/tea/adjustabl...

Fast, reliable, not flashy... exactly what you are looking for.

Also not exactly hard to find: well known brand, first page on Amazon for kettle electric temperature control, Wirecutter "Also great" recommendation for electric kettles, ...

Dial is on the base. My kettle lives on a high shelf, because kitchens in Japan are not exactly famous for the countertop acreage. :)

I’ll probably buy this one one I get back to the US, though.

I also like that OXO was a brand founded on accessibility: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OXO_(kitchen_utensils_brand)

https://fellowproducts.com/products/staggekg

I was looking for a bedside alarm clock a few weeks back, and was prepared to spend serious money on it, but really there's not much and nothing of quality.

I got two clocks in the end: The Braun Digital (BNC008G), only meh, ugly display and a very weird user interface. You can literally turn the alarm off by accident easily when you turn on the backlight which seems like a blindingly obvious design flaw (this is for an item that self-proclaims "humanistic approach to design").

And the classic Casio TQ-140 which was incredibly cheap (£7 inc delivery). I'll likely keep buying the Casio every few years as the old ones break.

I have written here before of an alarm clock I bought that is surely the ideal alarm clock. I bought it at a store which mainly sells things that have been discontinued. It has a battery to power its alarm function, and if necessary, sound off with a piezo transducer powered by the battery. That means loss of power will not cause the clock to stop, and it will wake you at the scheduled time whether it lost power during the night or not. It has a slide switch to change from standard time to summer time. But in normal operation it uses mains power as normal alarm clock radios do. It has a very normal/cliche design. I never saw this clock in a catalog, online or otherwise, and when it dies I will have to settle for a lesser alarm clock. Or use my phone I guess.

What you actually want is https://www.zojirushi.com/category/water_boilers_warmers/sys...

I live in Japan, so those are readily available.

What is, however, in short supply is countertop acreage. :)

My kettle lives on a somewhat high shelf on a gorilla rack... because that's the only place I can put it.

Can these truly making boiling water? I found kettles I've used in Japan didn't make the water hot enough to make a cup of tea.

Aside from instant noodles or soup, I would be hard pressed to think of a food-related use for kettles in Japan that isn’t making tea. Maybe you were using the wrong setting? Lots of Japanese tea isn’t meant to be made with boiling water, so it'll warm the water to ~just below boiling.

I don't understand the concept of a kettle with a dial on it, although I've gathered it is common in some places other than the US. Is this mainly for people who don't have an electric burner? I think I've encountered claims it is faster, but heating water on the stove seems very quick to me and I don't quite understand how the heat transfer could be much greater.

Standalone kettles are usually induction plates. They’re more efficient and less dangerous than a typical stove.

I am not clear that they are significantly more efficient. Note the bit below "that varies widely depending on the type of pot or kettle you use".

http://insideenergy.org/2016/02/23/boiling-water-ieq/

"An electric stovetop is about 70 percent efficient, although that varies widely depending on the type of pot or kettle you use. Most of the energy is lost heating the air around the stove. An electric teakettle is about 80 percent efficient, although again this varies from kettle to kettle. Electric kettles are generally very well insulated, and the heating coils sit directly in the water, so less heat is lost to the air. An induction stove or hot plate is about 85 percent efficient. It creates an electromagnetic current directly in a pot to generate heat, losing very little to the air."

[as a footnote, the above apparently implies that kettles are not necessarily induction, and of course there are stovetops that are induction]

I had a stand-alone electric kettle on my countertop for years because I drink a lot of tea, and it's so much faster than heating water on the stove or in the microwave. If I'm cooking pasta or hard-boiling eggs, I'll start by boiling water in the kettle to make the whole process faster, then pour it into a pot on the stove.

I'm passionate enough about having nearly-boiling water available at all times, that when I remodeled my kitchen, I put in tea spigot: a tiny water heater under my sink that keeps water nearly-boiling and ready to dispense at all times, with a little dedicated spigot built into the sink. So now I don't have a kettle on the counter, but only because it's built into the sink.

If I had to guess, it probably gets used 5+ times a day.

Induction heats much faster than a stove burner coil. As for the dial, apparently different kinds of tea taste better at different temperatures according to the variety.

Everybody always says this, but without numbers that I can relate to. Also, this thing about kettles being all induction does not sound right.

I got to go make a cup of coffee/tea and see how long it takes me.

Edit: I just put my metal, non-electric kettle with 500 mL of cold tap water on a completely cold electric range and the time from turning the dial to Hi to the kettle whistling was 3 minutes +/- about 1 second.

First google hit for "electric kettle test time to boil" is from consumer reports (I assume they are US only):

"The electric kettles bring the water to a boil in about 4 to 5½ minutes"

...then again, I wouldn't have thought it but maybe electric kettles in the UK are faster?

https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/kettles/article/how-we-test-...

"The fastest kettles can boil a litre in less than two minutes and 18 seconds, but we've also tested kettles that take nearly twice as long - leaving you waiting around for your cuppa."

So, my conclusion is an electric kettle might be noticeably faster on a percentage basis, but it reminds me of people who think a car that goes from 0-60 in 2.6 seconds is way higher performance than one that takes 3.6 seconds.

I think induction cooktops were a separate option from kettles.

> ...then again, I wouldn't have thought it but maybe electric kettles in the UK are faster?

I can imagine it being related to 120 volt outlets vs 240 volts, though I don't really know.

Ordinary sockets in a UK home supply ~240 volts at up to 13 amps = 3kW of power. In comparison a typical US outlet is ~120 volts (can be 110, can be 120, it varies) at up to 15 amps = 1.8kW.

In both countries a home will have some beefier power for special purposes. In the UK (unless it's a really big house) this would be different sockets rated for more current at 240 volts or just stuff wired permanently for the higher current. e.g. an electric oven might be 20A at 240V = 4.8kW.

In the US the weird way they get 110V means most homes (except maybe smaller dwellings in a multi-residence building) get 2x opposite 110V supplies so you can do 220V (which may be closer to 250V in some cases, again it varies) by wiring across the two sides to deliver power for an oven or central air conditioning system or other power hungry equipment. Again this is either wired in or uses less common sockets so that you don't plug the wrong stuff in.

I believe the US is fully standardized on 120V and 60Hz for quite some time.

> In the US the weird way they get 110V

As a US resident I'm genuinely curious - what do you find weird about how we do the conversion from three phase? Doesn't the UK use three phase for transmission as well? Or is it three pole single phase itself that you find weird?

> uses less common sockets

Three pole single phase outlets are fully standardized in the national codes the same as 15 and 20 amp outlets are (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMA_connector). NEMA 5 and 14 (previously 10, deprecated for 15+ years depending on jurisdiction) are the only outlet types I've ever encountered in a home.

Although the nominal power is standardised, for a variety of reasons the actual voltage of your supply will vary within agreed ranges (and this is true elsewhere). Frequency shouldn't change because it's a problem for the power plants if they can't agree on frequency.

Having three phase transmission isn't weird, it's the three pole single phase. There's no reason to do that except it's too late to change it now.

The argued upside seems to be that it makes household electrical systems less dangerous (reduced voltage). But if you care about that you'd design the rest of the system to be less dangerous as they did across Europe. For example, obviously the last few millimetres of the live pins of a plug should be insulated, you don't need them to conduct power and a human might touch them, so insulate them.

The point wasn't that these higher power sockets aren't standard (the NEMA standard is rubbish but it's a standard) but that they are literally less common.

You're going to want a bit more than 4kJ/K to heat up water, and fresh water from a kitchen tap might be say 280K while you want to boil it, so 373K, for a difference of 93K. So that's about 400kJ of energy.

A (good) UK electric kettle will almost invariably have a 3kW flat element (13A at 240V = 3.1kW but you don't want to get too close to the maximum). So that's turning almost 3kJ of electricity into heat every second, which works out to just over 130 seconds = 2 minutes and change to boil the water as the reviewers found.

Edit: Forgot to add, I assumed one litre which is also what Which used in their test. In practice you might boil just 2 cups of water to make a beverage, which will be much faster.

>2 minutes and change to boil the water as the reviewers found

The bottom line for me is that (in the UK where maybe small appliances can draw more) it takes 2-4 minutes, so as a pessimist, I wouldn't count on one that I can buy being faster than 3 minutes.

I suppose I might do another test with 1L since I only used half that. But half a liter is plenty for one cup.

It's possible that my setup works better than most because my kettle is almost a perfect hemisphere that exactly covers a large burner.

The temperature control is good for fine teas and coffees that require more fine tuned temperature settings.

If you are down for a little bit of hands on work with installing a router distribution, a PCEngines APU2 make an absolutely wonderful router that can handle full gigabit, at around $150 usd, and the case is just a generic black/red/blue box, rather than some scifi spaceship from a cyberpunk fever dream, it doesn't even have any logos.

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

https://i.imgur.com/Fa8nSN8.jpg

They are just generic x86 machines so they are never going to fall afoul of the problems of a lot of closed ARM routers like closed source drivers that never get updated, AND they have coreboot and no intel ME/amd PSP style nastiness!.

My original Apple TV made a great plate warmer but it was only 10BaseT. Can the router toast two or four slices at once?

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