As a Brit, the best thing about 230v is being able to run a 3kW kettle to make my tea. I took this for granted until I moved to the US.
When we want tea, we just fill up the cup with the already boiled and ready water. It's super efficient because it's super insulated so it barely takes any energy to keep it hot after it's been boiled.
Why don't Brits (and other tea drinking cultures in Europe) do this?
I kid, but there's something about "fresh" water probably?
Also it will reboil after a certain amount of time.
Always use freshly drawn (filtered if possible) cold water in the kettle. Tea loves oxygen as it helps the flavour develop.
Most of us are guilty of the following... looking at the kettle seeing there is some old, used water in there and simply re-boiling.
If you keep re-boiling the water in the kettle, it loses all of its oxygen and you’ll be left with a really flat cup of tea.
If you boil the kettle with fresh water, you’ll have a delicious cup of oxygenated tea that tastes divine.
https://twinings.co.uk/blogs/news/how-to-make-a-cup-of-tea-p...
I'm not sure how much difference this makes, but when I use the hot water boiler at work, the tea definitely tastes slightly off compared to using a kettle at home. But it's also possible the hot water boiler at work is not producing hot enough water.
You’re meant to replace the water daily. Not sure how many follow that guideline.
ETA: Only the so-called “hybrid” models have vacuum insulation. It’s worth the extra charge.
So I don't think the science backs this up.
Make tea such that you enjoy it. Same as coffee.
That's BS. It's true: people do have different tastes and preferences, so opinions are just that. But it's not "superstition": different brands/blends of tea really do taste different, many times remarkably so. It's just like a McDonald's burger vs. a burger from a high-end restaurant. One of course isn't objectively better than the other (from a taste standpoint; I'm ignoring nutrition here), since it's a matter of opinion, but you will find that significant groups of people who like a particular food enough to have tried different varieties will usually form similar opinions, or at least sort themselves into different camps.
"Superstition" implies that the differences people taste are not real, and this is quite simply false. The differences are real; it's up to you which one you like better. More expensive doesn't always mean better-tasting.
If you've a specialty tea shop nearby, that's all but certainly better, though it can be pricey.
You'll find there's a whole new world out there, and may regret discovering a taste for real whole-leaf teas.
Greens, whites, blacks, fermented, oolongs, darjeelings, matcha, gunpowder, pu'er, etc.
There are also herbal teas, such as rooibos, not made from sinchilla (tea plant), but also tasty.
https://insinkerator.emerson.com/en-us/shop/insinkerator/ins...
If you're dead-set on "reoxygenating" your boiling-hot water, pour it from a slight height such that air bubbles form and re-aerate the water.
<https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-solubility-water-d_63...>
As to why Asian households have it and we don't, I think it's simply that we have been boiling water in kettles since the stoves ran on coal, and the electric kettle is just an upgrade of that same old system
Not to mention the age of our housing stock. The Asian households you refer to, when were their homes built? I'm guessing much more recently, comparatively speaking.
The Japanese water boilers look like they cost £200ish (vs £15 for a kettle) and are bulkier than a kettle. They will save practically no time - kettles boil fast here and while they're boiling it gives you time to put the tea in and any other preparations.
Sorry, that's wrong. The breakers on my 100V outlets here in Tokyo are 15A IIRC (I'm not home at the moment). 30A sounds like an air conditioning circuit. 30A on a regular outlet would require huge wires; they're not going to wire a whole apartment with that stuff.
I actually have a kettle here, bought in Japan. It's rated at 900W. It's OK for boiling a single cup of water, but it's definitely not quick. Faster than the microwave though: microwaves here are 500W or 600W (frequently selectable), and the high-end ones go up to 900W. All this should tell you something about the amp capacity of the kitchen outlets here.
900W is how much my kettle is rated for, which means it actually draws 900W of power (which is about 9A at 100V).
For the microwave, 900W is the power transmitted to the food, not the power drawn from the outlet. All microwaves are rated this way. But microwaves are not particularly efficient; just guessing, I'd guess that a typical 1200W American microwave draws around 1500-1600W, and certainly no more than 1800W since that's the max the outlet can provide. So my microwave at the 900W setting probably draws a bare minimum of 1100W (11A at 100V).
And that's a fancy microwave; the typical microwaves here are all 500/600W. I think the most powerful one I've ever seen in a store was 1000W, so that's probably the highest power rating that can safely run on typical kitchen circuits here in reasonably modern buildings.
Of course the above is standard, not everyone takes the standard. However it is unusual to take something else.
Builders (read electric codes) build for what is common uses. If everyone wants an something that uses a lot of power the wires will be made to handle that in new houses. However if you want that same thing in an older house you may discover that the rewiring needed makes it not worth it and so you look for an alternate.
My pet peeve in the US is ordering a cup of tea and getting a cup of cooling water and a teabag by the side. Fine for herbal or green tea but terrible for black tea.
We keep it at 195 since we don't make black teas, and then we can let it cool down to whichever tea we want or just mix it with some filtered cold to get it to temp.
The limiting factor is the specific heat capacity of water. If daily consumption is 2l, you have to put in the joules to raise 2l to boiling, either way. If you have heat losses during the day, there's your inefficiency.
Because it is better to boil the right amount of water to the precise temperature when you need it, as it takes virtually no time.
=-=-=
Question #1: Can we get 3 kilowatts of power out of some lithium ion batteries?
There are high-current versions of lithium batteries. Conveniently, they're widely available because they're used for vaping.
I found a battery that looks reasonable (https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/molicel-p42a). Its stats: 4200 mAh capacity, 3.6V nominal, 45A continuous discharge, and retail cost $4.99.
At 3.6V and 45A, each battery should output 162 watts. Rounding to 150 watts, we'd need 20 of them to make 3 kilowatts. So $100 worth of batteries.
=-=-=
Question #2: How long will they last? Long enough to boil water?
At the 45-amp discharge rate and with 4.2 amp-hour capacity, it should take 4.2/45 hours = 6 or 7 minutes to discharge them.
By my math, it takes 335 kilojoules to heat a liter of water from 20°C to 100°C. A 3 kilowatt kettle should be able to do it in 335/3 = 112 seconds.
So the batteries should be able to boil water around 3 times before discharged.
=-=-=
Those calculations are for running on battery alone. Since you can get 1500W out of an American 120V outlet, you could make a kettle that draws 1500W from the wall and boosts it with 1500W of battery power. (I'd use two heating elements.) Then you only need $50 of batteries.
The kettle is going to be a bit heavy, though. The batteries are 70g each, so 20 of them is 1.4 kg. Also, I don't know much batteries heat up when cranking out 45 amps, but I bet the answer is a lot, and you may need active cooling and/or thermal shutoff.
I've seen such a box for sale, I think for the RV market. You plug into both phases of the 120/240V split phase and get a dryer plug at a lower amperage.
Ignoring the UK with their 13A/30A rings for a moment, since their wiring is unique.
Aside from kettles? I guess maybe some people have electric heaters? What else pulls enough power that the extra voltage will matter? Vacuums maybe, but no, those are limited to 1600W.
- Irons are commonly 2000-3200W (3200W is 14.5A at 220V)
- Portable Induction Stovetops are 3000W
- Deep Fryers are 2000-3000W
- Hair Dryers are 2000-2500W
And of course some things are connected via 3-phase 400V (3 220V phases, because of the 120° phase offset that's 400V between any two phases)
- actual oven + stovetop combinations, about 7000W for the stovetop, plus 1000W for the oven
- many tankless water heaters, 5000W-24000W seems common
The most impactful in day-to-day use are probably kettles and hair dryers, but with stovetops and water heaters there's probably a big difference in the prevalence in gas vs electrical, and tankless vs boiler simply due to wiring.
The 'industrial' level appliances are probably less of an issue, because the wiring run is limited and you can customize it however you need to. I could go down and buy a 36kW electric tankless water heater today and wire it up without any difficulty. Though it would probably be worth upgrading my 200A panel in that case.
Ranges sound like they're probably pretty similar. Typical modern electric ranges in the US are about 10kW.
Three phases would be handy for reducing the cost of wiring, though. Cost me $1500 USD just for the wire when I ran four new circuits last year. Couple of them were 50A, which is partly why it was so expensive, but mostly it's just that copper is $$$. Any bigger than 60A and I'd switch to aluminum.
For the a typical US house the standard feed into the house is 200 amps at 240v. So 48kW of power coming in we just segment it down a lot more.
> Lots of smaller (kw) circuits is safer than a few very large circuits.
Not fully convinced about the safety aspect but it definitely feels more convenient (can selectively turn rooms off if you need to work on something) - if I'm ever opening the walls, I'm going to switch to that approach. At the very least, I want to have a dedicated 20amp circuit in the home office...
Also I recently redid my kitchen and I added an additional 20 amp circuit just for the kitchen island outlets and it has been super nice.
Also with replacing all your breakers it can increase safety. But first the breakers are not cheap. Second it can lead to a lot of nuisance trips, albeit that is better than it used to be with modern breakers.
Breakers are probably going to be a bit cheaper and easier than opening all the walls to redo the circuits though...
The continental European system doesn't really solve it, as far as I know, so you have thicker wires on low power appliances than you would in the USA.
The fuse prevents that.
I’ve only seen one in person myself. More common is a fridge that can dispense hot water (!!)
The building code for the province of Ontario (Canada) states that delivered water cannot be higher than 49C (120F); §7.6.5.1. Maximum Temperature of Hot Water:
* https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/r04023
An exception is given for dish— and clothes washer outlets.
It says nothing about fixtures that increase the temperature of water and dispense it, and does not limit the temperature of dispensed water. Instant hot taps are both legal and commonplace in Canada.
In the UK I put the water on then while it’s boiling get a mug and tea bag and then the kettle is boiled very soon after.
In the US I generally wonder off as the kettle takes a couple of minutes longer.
AFAIK stovetop is also sometimes used when people mean cooktop, though in my area it's more often a casual reference to the burners of a range. I'm sure that convention varies wildly across the country.
A furnace is what you use to make clay set into a pot!
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/guy-martins-great-britis...
Schuko makes the most sense because it's unpolarized, so appliances don't expect a neutral leg. You still have the 50/60 Hz problem, but something like a kettle probably won't care.
Or there could be a countertop "Schuko dongle" that attaches to the screw terminals on the back of an existing range, if it weren't for those meddling codes...
Though in practice, the key to boiling fast is to use less water. A 1500W kettle with 500 mL minimum fill is totally reasonable for cup of coffee/tea.
Fuses/breakers are ultimately about heat control. They can run "indefinitely" at their rated amperage, but can support short, higher loads.
Practically speaking, any intermittent device that _can_ run continuously or can fail to a continuous needs to be considered as such for safety purposes.
For example, a fridge should only run the compressor intermittently, but it has two obvious cases where the compressor could run indefinitely:
* An influx of heat, like filling an empty fridge with room temperature cans.
* A door being left open.
In the case of the kettle, it will likely be evaluated against it's "nominal" draw after the initial startup. If the auto-off sensor were to fail, it could run continuously at the tempurature.
An appliance manufacturer may be under different UL regulations for failure modes of a device on a specific rated circuit. I don’t know anything about that.
So you can run indefinitely at the nameplate rating in Australia, but only 3 hours in the US. And the startup current (inrush) can be much higher than the rating. Most breakers are thermo-magnetic. The magnetic part has a much higher tripping point and allows for inrush current. The thermo part trips when it gets too hot, and that'll be the current printed on the breaker.
Prior to the late 70s / early 80s so called "automatic kettles" were not necessarily all that common in the UK, and one had to manually switch them off.
I certainly recall a time or two with a kitchen full of steam due to forgetting about putting the kettle on.
Many commercial appliances use 5-20 plugs. Also, lots of commercial cleaning equipment seems to use 5-20, which is why you see businesses tend to only use 5-20 outlets.
I'm not aware of any kettles that use 5-20 plugs but I bet they exist somewhere.
A kettle is fine at a full circuit load for under 3 hours.
If I wanted a British kettle in the US I'd wire up a 6-20R, buy a British kettle, and swap the plug.
In practice, NEC code likely prohibits you from doing this.
You can also wire a duplex 120V with the two phases (you might find this in some kitchens, and in my workshop). Then you can make a dangerous extension cord adapter combining the split phase 120V into one 240V female plug.
Yet in Britain, with a 3 kW kettle, I've never managed to trip it, with a combination of laundry machine, electric oven, microwave, dishwasher. Is there no circuit breaker limit?
That's massive.
Then, standard ring circuit is 32A, and individual sockets are limited to 13A (via fuse in plug). So you will need to have 2 kettles on on the same circuit and then add a third device pulling not an insignificant amount of power (32 - 2x13 = 6A) before the breaker trips. This will be safe if the ring circuit is not faulty as they are usually wired with two 2.5mm2 cables (two because it's a ring) that have a standard rating of 24A each...
- dedicated 50A 240V for an electric stove or oven (unless gas service is present)
- dedicated 20A 120V each for the fridge, microwave, dishwasher, disposal (the latter being uncommon outside the US and Canada). The last two often share a circuit.
- two 20A countertop circuits with GFCI protection (what the Brits call 'RCD' - the difference being ours trip at 5mA vs 30mA and won't knock out half the house.)
A typical British kitchen will have a ton of sockets (although never enough), to plug in a fridge (or two, or three), a microwave (or several - they rarely goes about 1kW anyway), a dishwasher, a washing machine, a tumble dryer (UK kitchens tend to have washers and dryers, rather than bathrooms. Larger houses have separate utility rooms)
The only thing on a dedicated circuit would be a hard-wired oven.
A software analogy would be running all your services on separate VMs, as opposed to running them all on a single server which could go down at once.
Brits don't even put outlets in the bathroom, minus a current-limited transformer-isolated one for an electric razor.
Has never been an issue anywhere I lived in the UK. As I understand it they have been putting in 30A/230V ring circuits as standard for 75 years now.
Wait, really? That’s seriously underpowered, though I guess if you never need electric stoves or heating it could be somewhat usable. An ex-Soviet big-city apartment building will usually support 40A (~9kW) per apartment, and in France I had the impression that the values were similar—except for student dorms, which are supplied and wired like apartment buildings despite the density of occupants being 3x that or more, because apparently the builders could not into engineering and the uni authorities find it easier to blame the occupants (yes, I’m still a bit salty about that).
I have always wondered if those limits and the high electricity costs are because Italy abolished nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, doesn't have a massive oil and gas operation, so most of it is imported at a premium.
We should thank whoever came up with the idea of abolishing nuclear power in Italy. What a big mistake!
> if you never need electric stoves or heating it could be somewhat usable
Heating and stoves in Italy are usually gas-powered. Ovens and kettles are electric but normally do not exceed 3.3 kW, however, we need to be careful not to use too many high-consumption appliances together (e.g., oven and washing machine).
The introduction of increasingly restrictive energy classes for electric appliances in recent years has mitigated the problem to some extent anyway.
You guys really need to get on the solar panels, though.
In the Soviet system, usually not. There are often several downstream circuits with their own 20A or so breakers and wiring (e.g.: kitchen stove, normal kitchen sockets, bathroom sockets and lighting, other rooms’ sockets, everything non-wet lighting), but each apartment is normally supplied from a single phase. On the other hand, different apartments on the same floor (or different single-family homes on the same street, etc.) might indeed be supplied from different phases. Normal (Schuko) wall sockets are most frequently 16A (so yes, 3kW kettles max), stove sockets (and circuits) might be up to 32A, still single-phase.
(That’s not to say the system is ideal, of course. E.g. GFCIs have become common only in the past fifteen years or so, and in a country-home setting I’ve actually encountered disposable screw-socket [IEC 60269] fuses.)
> I'm struggling to understand how the British grid works
In a perfect world a ring circuit is a clever invention - it offers a circuit that can safely deliver about 7.3kW with hardly any more copper than normally could deliver about 4.6kW.
However in practice they have a hidden failure mode - if you break the ring they will carry on working apparently without problem except it’s quite possible that you now have overheating cables in a wall somewhere. In the real world houses are full of changes (both DIY and professional) that inadvertently break the ring and it’s not at all uncommon to see in a house with even modest refurb works having been done.
I live in an early 20th century apartment in San Francisco and I quickly learned not to run my 1.8kW kettle at the same time as my 1.2kW microwave as it would consistently trip the power.
More annoying is when the fridge compressor motor starts up while running either as that also trips the power.
Rings are more complex to test, and have nasty failure modes. I'd argue that they should only be used in said small flats, and that 20A bus/radial runs should be used in larger builds. i.e. any modern house, rather than a flat. Said run the supplying all of the sockets in any given room, it does though require a larger "consumer unit".
The rings have a 30A (or now 32A) at the "consumer unit" (distribution fuse box) with two cables running in a loop around all sockets in the circuit. The cables have traditionally been 2.5mm, and open clipped, so rated at around 27A (based upon preventing overheating).
Hence when operating properly, the wiring in the circuit can carry 54A, the circuit is fused at 30A (or 32A) to protect the cable, and an individual load is limited to 13A (being the highest cartridge fuse commonly available).
Have a look here: https://www.diydoctor.org.uk/projects/cablesizes.htm
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Rheem-Performance-36-kw-Self-Mod...
/s
The worst part of the British system though (although I don’t think this has anything to do with voltage, IDK) is there is nowhere to plug-in your razor, hair clippers, hair dryer, toothbrush, curling iron, etc. etc.
Regulations change over time, this home's bathrooms are all interior, with fans to evacuate moisture, and the toilets accordingly have internal overflow†, both these features were not legal when my parents home was built.
† Historically for a residential toilet in the UK if the water rises above the intended maximum level in the tank, it just runs into a pipe to the outside of the building, in principle you can now see what's wrong and it's not dangerous... but, if you don't fix it promptly this results in a stain on the building exterior, as well as potentially wider water damage, plus it can freeze in mid-winter which isn't good. But wait, a toilet has a very obvious place to dump unwanted water, it's connected to the sewer and if that is broken you've got much more serious problems. So a modern toilet tank just re-uses the flush mechanism to dump excess water the same place as everything else. This elegant solution, already needed in some commercial applications, was I believe made legal in newer residential building regulations maybe in the 1980s.
Part of the reason I emigrated.
https://www.canadianhomeinspection.com/home-reference-librar...
There's a famous, common 20VA fixture by Legrand with a distinctive symbol. I asked an electrician about this last year. Most electricians will still fit them.
It won't supply a hairdryer or a pair of curling tongs, probably. Not that you really want such things in a bathroom or without an earth pin.
I've rarely had it happen in the bathroom, even with outlets right next to a sink. But I had an outlet at ground level outdoors that would trip during heavy storms sometimes. We fixed it by putting a physical cover over it.
Generally I use an insulated 4L kettle that stays warm all day, so it heats up very quickly when needed and somewhat negates the issue.
This makes it about half as fast at boiling water.
https://www.aeg.co.uk/kitchen/cooking/hobs/induction-hob/ikb...
3.7kW for the main element.
Also, why would it be less efficient? Due to the distance?
The resistive element submerged in the water dumps very nearly 100% of energy into the water. The stove heating the kettle has many more sources of loss, but mostly that it first heats a piece of metal, which is not fully submerged in water.
Edit: Wait. Are you using a frying pan to heat tee water to make it faster?
This would be both code legal, safe and functional.
It would also be possible to use a clothes dryer socket (NEMA 14-30), but you should install a smaller than usual breaker for the circuit (15 amps), since the british kettle normally has a 13 amp fuse in it's plug, but a NEMA plug does not contain that.
Two minutes on high (1100 watt microwave output from, IIRC 1800 watt input) per cup. So usually two minutes for the one cup of I intend to drink.
Every electric kettle I’ve ever owned has a minimum volume of at least two cups. Who bother heating two cups if I’m only going to drink one at a time.
Tasmania (AU), 240v / 100amp supply to residential is standard.
All new kettles have boil-dry protection as well, so they won't be damaged with no water at all.
Not necessarily to code, consult your electrical engineer and lawyer before doing your own wiring, etc.
That's no problem, standard romex nm-b is rated up to 600V. The only real difficulty in doing that in most US homes is that it's all or nothing. You'd have to upgrade all receptacles on the circuit to 240V. Depending on when your home was built, the kitchen might well have several circuits for the wall receptacles (even just one circuit per receptacle, not terribly uncommon in my area), which makes converting one of the circuits to 240V pretty trivial.
Given how many appliances these days use switching power supplies capable of a wide range of voltage, I wouldn't be totally surprised if it was possible to wire an entire house with nothing but 6-15 or 6-20 receptacles and not have too much difficulty sourcing compatible appliances.
Most devices you'd use outside the kitchen usually will work on any voltage - with notable exceptions being vacuum cleaners, washing machines and fan heaters.
Probably about as likely as wiring up DC receptacles throughout the house. Zero.
Check with your local codes of course. Even if the local codes allow it, your building inspector may not.
And we would wear those things out, I swear! :-)
I think Americans think British people drink tea out of poshness, when it is the opposite. Most of us also like a posh tea now and then, some of us drink expensive leaf teas... but the majority of what we drink is optimised for fast brewing off boiling water: tea that goes black in the mug in thirty seconds in boiling water.
There is a concept here of "builders tea" -- the kind of thing a builder drinks -- which is sort of the functional equivalent of cheap electric coffee-pot coffee. That is, it's the kind you know isn't the best, but you will still drink it, and that cuts across all class lines. [0]
There is a parallel thing: the "tea urn", which is like an enormous samovar with a lever -- that you still will see in industrial canteens and at church coffee mornings and at gatherings that aren't at cafés or restaurants. Those things actually need a different kind of tea, which brews more slowly and at slightly lower temperatures. The end result is a bit like builders tea. But we wouldn't bother with them at home.
[0] We do absolutely drink coffee at home, but aside from appalling instant coffee we tend to skip over the coffee-pot coffee in the UK, to slightly more expensive ways of making coffee or to dreadful Nespresso machines. You'll see more of those or Bialetti mokas here; old style electric coffee pot percolators are now rather unusual. But Alan Adler's Aeropress particularly caught on here among coffee nerds, because that is really compatible with electric kettle life.
At least with EU induction stoves, so 230V.
US induction cooktops/stoves are almost always 240V, unless you get a little countertop burner.
> I'm kind of surprised by this.
As am I. The first time I put a small pot of water on my induction cooktop and turned it on maximum power, I laughed out loud. If I'm only doing enough for a cup of coffee or tea, it starts boiling so fast you don't want to step away.
> US induction cooktops/stoves are almost always 240V, unless you get a little countertop burner.
EU induction cooktops/stoves are actually 380/400V.
It doesn't change much, because the amperage might be lower, I don't know.
I just wanted to add that bit of trivia :-)
For example this: https://www.emag.ro/plita-cu-inductie-aeg-hob-hood-60-cm-ikb... (in the EU), at max power can supposedly reach 7.3kW.
Edit: Checked per element, max 3.7k, more than enough anyway.
On an electric kettle, there's just a heating element, often directly bathed in the hot water.
There's absolutely less losses with the electric kettle, so for a 3kW kettle and a 3kW induction cooktop the kettle is slightly more efficient. Slightly.
For me, a big selling point of the kettle is that you don't have to clean it and stow it after every use, so I would still use the kettle even if it was slower (maybe no longer for pasta or when cooking in general though)...
edit: I guess you could just get a teapot that is induction-compatible, didn't think of that.
The difference is 2 minutes on the boil time of 1L.
> USA uses 230-240 VAC, too. The only difference is that we ground it in the center, creating "split" phases, reducing the peak voltage relative to ground and making it easier to interface low-power loads. But high-power loads (stoves, water heaters, clothes dryers, etc.) operate across the full voltage, reducing the current required.
3000 / 230 = 13.04
3000 / 240 = 12.5
We fit 13A fuses to the plugs of kettles. At 230V the tolerance would be too close.
Whereas in reality, a kettle designed to be 3kW at 240V would only be 2.755kW at 230V, or 2.520kW at 220V.
You'll often find the latter pair of number printed on the base of the kettle. i.e. 2520-3000W at 220-240V.
Note that the above is about safety. If you are going to draw 16 amps you should stick to a circuit rates for that, as it will have less resistance and thus waste less energy.
Being compelled to wait two minutes more to boil a kettle for a cuppa would be enough to provoke an armed rebellion.
Not even sure I'm kidding.
(Or it goes into a teapot for brewing, and again needs to be just off the boil for that)
Given that we can boil a kettle for a mug's worth of tea in not much more than half a minute, there's no reason to use them, I think.
The reason Americans don't have a super fast boiling kettle is that very few Americans WANT a very fast boiling kettle for large portions of water. If an American wants a cup of tea, two minutes or less in the microwave is sufficient. I don't care if you think that's bad, because I want a cup of tea, not some elitist purity contest.
And tea in the UK has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "elitism", which is something you projected onto what I said for your own reasons, I guess. The very opposite: tea serves the same function as coffee does in the USA, cutting across all class and status.
In fact the kind of tea you drink in the USA tends towards being what people here would call "posh" tea, because you drink the more unusual, expensive stuff as infrequent drinkers. Most of what we drink is robust and cheap.
Americans find our tea to be the same way we find your coffee: a distinct culture and taste that is acquired, not instantly loved.
(We'll leave it to the Aussies and New Zealanders to talk to you about your coffee; they came over and fixed ours.)
But I am reminded that it is foolish to try to convey a point in a humorous way on Hacker News.
On demand hot water, from the safety of your combat vehicle, is a genuine war innovation on the same level as canned food. Especially now that combat vehicles are aiming towards having more robust electrical systems makes it trivial to implement. Hot water means hot food, means warmth on a cold day, means sterilizing sketchy water sources without chemical tablets, means you don't have to light a visible fire to make your coffee, means you keep morale way higher. Your troops are now cleaner, better fed, happier, more motivated.