Comment by alisonatwork | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alisonatwork | Hacker News Reader

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You have clearly never lived in North America, continent of pathetic kettles. It's hard enough to find one here that's electric in the first place, it seems people prefer to balance their kettles on the tops of stoves, like peasants. On the odd occasion you do find one that plugs into a wall, often it's like it was designed in the dark ages before they were cordless, and of course the cord is only about 6 inches long, so you have to unplug it to move it to the tap for a refill, then plug it in again. My current apartment's kettle doesn't even have a lid or a button, you have to fill it through the spout and it starts boiling immediately when you plug it in. After all that, it still takes about 27 minutes to make a cup of tea. Forget all these fancy lime scale filters and temperature controls, just finding a £5 one that actually worked would be a dream.

Rant aside, apparently a large part of the problem is because North America uses 110v at the wall. Quick explanation here[0]. As mentioned in the linked article, many houses here also have a separate high voltage line for washing machines. Perhaps they should have a high voltage kettle line.

[0] http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2012/04/16/why-kettles-boil-slow...

I’m sorry, but what? There are infinite electric kettles available. 27 minutes to boil water? Again, what?

Seriously, have you ever been in North America? Just go into literally any big box retailer and find the 50 foot long shelves full of electric kettles. Or go to an online retailer, say Amazon, and find hundreds and hundreds of them. Virtually every major brand makes electric kettles, they all seem to work just fine, and they don’t take 27 minutes to boil water.

> 27 minutes to boil water? Again, what?

They're exaggerating. But your typical North American electric kettle is—ballpark—twice as slow as a European kettle.

Your standard North American sockets provide half the voltage but not double the amperage, so they're half as powerful.

Not much we can do about that, I’m afraid. Most residential outlets are 15 amps, and to double them to 30 amps or convert them to 240V would require costly rewiring. And copper prices are sky-high these days.

I wonder if a kettle with a J1772 or Tesla port...

What about a kettle with a giant battery pack that charges when idle and boils at 10kW when you press the button.

At that point one might as well get an instant boiling water tap system.

Photonicinduction's 10-second kettle[1] doesn't use a battery, instead it uses his 100A 240V input through a big variac to run at 10kW (440V, 22.7A). This isn't good for the longevity of the kettle he used, sadly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDLw1Rx_cAI

>Photonicinduction

whatever happened to the guy, i was a fan of his videos then he stopped posting a few years back...

electroboom seems to be covering a similar niche, so that's good though.

Joking aside, I use a Zojirushi vacuum kettle that keeps the water at the correct temperature at all times, so I never wait.

The electrician, drywall repair, and other skilled labor costs of running a thicker gauge wire to the kitchen from the circuit breaker would far outweigh the cost of the wire itself. By orders of magnitude.

From web searching, North America is 120V but two phases. So you could redo the socket to 240V without running new cable through your walls.

But that's kinda academic if nobody sells kettles that have the North American 240V plug.

> From web searching, North America is 120V but two phases. So you could redo the socket to 240V without running new cable through your walls.

You'd need an extra conductor of wire than is there in the cable for a standard 240V outlet. (Hot1, Hot2, Neutral, Gnd).

You can run a Hot1/Hot2 240V circuit with existing 14/2 romex, but odds are that whatever feeds the outlet in your kitchen also feeds many other outlets, and you don't want them all to be 240V.

Note North America doesn't use ring circuits like the UK.

The Japanese hot water things basically solve this problem too by maintaining hot water all the time.

Convenient but inefficient.

So water heaters are inefficient? I’m confused, they save time.

I mean the thermal (and hence, electrical) inefficiency of keeping hot water warm all the time.

Similarly, even with good insulation, a combi boiler is more efficient than having a hot water tank.

Or you could use two kettles

This guy thinks outside the box.

Till the fuses flip.

Yeah this only works if you have more than one circuit.

Sure, but 27 minutes is such an absurd exaggeration. I can boil a liter of water on my electric kettle in 4-5 minutes. I rarely need a full liter, anyway, and I don’t always want the water at boiling temperature. It is typically under 2 minutes for me to have hot water for a cup of tea. In Europe maybe those numbers are halved, but to me it’s just a trivial difference.

Sure. But what about 1.7L? That's what my typical kettles does, at maximum.

It's great for boiling water for cooking; at 230V it's faster than heating on the hob. But if it took 7–8 minutes, that'd be frustrating.

My stove has a power boil option for that. Do you typically use your kettle to boil water for cooking?

I typically don’t even keep track of how long it takes to boil on the stove. I just do the rest of the prep work.

Yeah, we use the kettle all the time, for quickly bringing water to the boil. Always for pasta. Sometimes for potatoes (though they are probably better gradually heated from cold).

A power boil option would be a decent alternative.

I'm probably just impatient, to be fair.

Electric kettles in America seem to be something of a boutique item. I often had to say “tea kettle” before anyone even understood what I was looking for.

They are definitely 100% available to buy. However, they cost more and seem to be of lower quality than the range available in the UK.

I suspect the voltage difference is the underlying reason. If you have a gas burner then an old fashioned stovetop kettle is almost as fast as an electric kettle in the US.

Americans cut the Gordian knot of the impossible kettle by making tea in the microwave.

As an American who makes tea in the microwave, I feel disparaged.

I don’t know about Canada and Mexico, but these are the search results for a popular US store:

https://www.target.com/s/kettle

I’ve been using this $25 kettle for many years now:

https://www.target.com/p/hamilton-beach-1l-electric-kettle-s...

The cord is “6 inches” (it’s actually 24 inches on my cheap kettle) because most kitchens in the US have many power outlets at the countertop, where the kettle sits. It would be annoying to deal with excess wire.

>it seems people prefer to balance their kettles on the tops of stoves, like peasants

Is your kettle faster than a stove? Perceptions of speed are funny.

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