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Comment by nandemo | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean that Brits use electric kettles, or they use regular kettles but stoves are mostly electric (instead of using gas)?

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Almost universally electric. Remember that (being essential for tea) they may be used many times a day and be found in offices and other places without other cooking facilities. Unfortunately, you can't make tea correctly with moderately hot water like what you get from some water coolers. The tea won't steep correctly.

Depends on the kind of tea. For black tea, near boiling is good, but for whites and oolongs it's not. Though I suppose the British are famous for black tea.

(I got a electric tea kettle with a built in thermometer not too long ago, so this is an interesting issue for me.)

So much so that you can't make black tea at high altitudes.

(An acquitance of mine has a kettle like yours at 1000m elevation, and with the thermostat set to 100°C it does not stop boiling of its own accord).

That's why normal electric kettles stop boiling when there's enough steam pressure.

I'm amazed that British adventurers ever managed to climb mountains if they couldn't make a decent cuppa on the way up.

We solve that problem by carrying a pressure cooker.

Well, British Tanks have a tea brewing device [1]:

"Similar to every British tank since the Centurion, and most other British AFVs, Challenger 2 contains a boiling vessel (BV)[citation needed] also known as a kettle or bivvie for water which can be used to brew tea, produce other hot beverages and heat boil-in-the-bag meals contained in ration packs.[9] This BV requirement is general for armoured vehicles of the British Armed Forces, and is unique to the armed forces of the UK."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_2#Crew_and_accommoda...

We've got our priorities straight; tea first, crushing & explosions later.

Depends on the kind of tea. For black tea, near boiling is good, but for whites and oolongs it's not. Though I suppose the British are famous for black tea.

In the UK (& Ireland) "tea" means black tea. You can get fancy teas, but "tea" on it's own just means black tea.

We put milk in it aswell.

And then you drink that swill?

We tried washing our hands with it instead, but that worked out even more poorly. :P Don't worry, the milk (and quite possibly sugar) kills the taste of the black tea nicely.

The milk and sugar is what I'm asking about. Black tea is just fine on its own, maybe with a bit of honey.

milk or cream tend to cut the bitter flavor in coffees and teas.

I drink my coffee with a fat source sometimes, but never my tea.

I thought the bitter flavour was the reason for drinking them?

Here's a sound guide: http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm

I prefer Adams' guide.

It's the nectar of the gods.

With it's own ISO standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

They would always use electric kettles. The idea of putting (basically) a pot on a stove to boil water sounds like still going outside to an outhouse to go to the toilet.

When renting a house for a holiday in USA once, my family went out to buy an electric kettle to make tea & coffee, and they weren't as common in shops as we thought. That was a weird eye-opener.

In Italy, very few people would own an electric kettle, or even a classic one.

I've travelled a fair bit and I've never, ever seen as many kettles as in Britain.

They are common in Germany as well.

Frankly, it's because people in the U.S. don't make tea very often. It's usually just once in the morning, during breakfast (if that.)

We almost universally use electric kettles - to us they are regular kettles.

The US/UK difference is mostly due to the electric supply I think. At 230v with a max draw of 13Amps per socket UK electric kettles boil fast compared to US ones in my experience.

They use electric kettles. Electric kettles are more useful in countries with 220/230V mains than in countries like the US with 110V mains.

Sorry for being thick, but why is that?

Simply a question of available power. Typical British kettles use 3kW (comfortably doable with 240V@13A); under US power (110V@15A) you can only manage about half that, which means waiting twice as long for your kettle to boil.

(American here) I recently upgraded from a 1kW to a 1.75kW kettle and thought it was a huge improvement. It does trip the circuit breaker if I try to run the toaster at the same time as the kettle though.

Oh, I thought US circuits would be spec'ed at higher amperages to make up for the lower voltage. How does that work for high power appliances then? I have a 10kW induction stove, how could you ever get that kind of power from an installation running at 110V?

Stoves, ovens and so on are usually on a different power line from your ordinary socket.

They often run on 220v too.

Canadian tea drinker checking in. I've used an electric kettle all my life and don't see what the problem is...

Electric kettles are common here even though we use 110V power. I've never timed it, but I think they can bring cold water to a boil in maybe 3 minutes, which is okay with me.

If electric kettles are rare in the States then I think it's because of a cultural difference, not because of the mains voltage. Sure it would be convenient if kettles boiled faster, but I don't think it makes that much of a difference.

Some people put a cordless electrical kettle on a gas stove, and melt the bottom and damage the kettle. Seriously, I've seen this happen a number of times, I've almost done it myself.

Electrical kettles are plastic. How on Earth do those people think that putting anything made of plastic on a gas stove is a good idea?

Some are mostly metal, which might not help. In any case it's probably something you'd do reflexively, without thinking about the material composition of the kettle at all.

Brits use electric kettles. I think I know one person that uses a kettle on a stove, and she uses gas.

Electric kettles. Regular kettles are not popular here (I had difficulty finding one a few years ago)

What you call a "regular kettle" is to us a hilarious archaism.

American versus British language is like that in general.

But Americans do seem to speak as though their ways were universal, more than other nations. I remember a Canadian who worked near the border expressing her amazement at being asked "do you take normal money?"

Americans, to an absurd degree, are rabidly ethnocentric. I'm not sure why this is; I think it has to do with being the major superpower during the global information explosion era.

I'm speaking as an American myself: I have a very hard time, despite being conscious of it, not thinking of all things American as a baseline for normalcy. I know, intellectually, that American dialects stagnated for centuries after being imported from Britain and eviscerated by Webster, but I still think of "colour" as a foreign and exotic spelling.

Reminds me of ordinary bikes.

... except where gas is cheaper than electricity.

I suspect one of the reasons for the popularity of small electrical appliances in Britain is that electricity is traditionally cheaper than gas, which is the opposite of what you'll find on mainland Europe.

> [in Britain] electricity is traditionally cheaper than gas

Rubbish, electricity is around 3x more expensive per KWh than gas in the UK. The UK has traditionally been a big gas exporter, too.

Electric kettles are used for convenience (faster, turns itself off) rather than financial reasons. Most people have little clue about what contributes what to their energy bills, too.

Presumably they are slower in the US because of lower mains voltage (x Amperage).

I am English, and was partly mimicking the parent who used "regular kettle" to mean "stove top kettle."

I did grow up with one though. My parents had previously lived in a house with a very small kitchen with no convenient place for an electric kettle. When they moved they kept their stove-top kettle until it burned through (about 10 years) and replaced it with an electric. I bought a stove-top kettle a few years ago for the same reason. It still comes out occasionally when an electric kettle breaks (which is quite often if you live in one of the "hard water" areas of Southern England.)

"when an electric kettle breaks (which is quite often if you live in one of the "hard water" areas of Southern England.)"

The trick is to every now and then turn the kettle on with no water in it. The calcium on the spiral at the bottom of the kettle will break into big chunks and fall off, if you just turn the kettle up side down they will fall out and you'll have a heating element as good as new (don't let it get too hot obviously, as that will damage the heating element and/or kettle itself).

You can also use vinegar to remove the calcium.

Yeah but it takes way longer if you need to remove a thick layer of calcium. What you can do is put in vinegar and then turn the kettle on. It improves the effectiveness of the vinegar, but it gets all frothy and stinks up your house. Also if you are are with your face over the kettle when you open it, the vinegar steam or whatever it's called stings in your eyes. So personally, my money is on turning the kettle on with no water :) (well actually my money is on buying a calcium filter, which is what I ended up doing in the end, but apart from that :) )

That will remove limescale from the heating element. Unfortunately some of it also finds its way into the auto-cutoff mechanism, causing it to switch off prematurely (or occasionally fail to switch off.)

There is a better way: just boil 100-200g of citric acid in a kettleful of water. It will dissolve the limescale with no damage to the heating element.

Normally electric, but we use a kettle that sits on a gas stove for aesthetic reasons.

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