Why Does A Good Kettle Cost $90+?
blog.chewxy.com
blog.chewxy.com
This almost made me laugh out loud. Exactly how many kettles does the author think sells each year? Multiply by models and again by manufacturers, and you're talking millions of kettles. Even if you consider that one model will last multiple years, manufacturers don't buy supply batches that last for years. Some industries go in the extreme other direction - the local car industry got its stock-on-shelf lifetime down to 48 minutes from part arriving to part being screwed into car.
Similarly, retail markup is generally 20-50% of the final cost. If you think this is too high (it really isn't) then I suggest you use your new formula to undercut the existing market and disrupt away. Other significant costs are transport and wholesalers (who aren't always the manufacturers). Kettles are bulky items that consume a lot of space in storage and transport. On top of all this, every party involved in the transaction is entitled to make some profit, and not just work for costs. There's also regulatory compliance, things like the CE mark.
Looking at an item and stating that the price shouldn't be more than parts + amortised kickback to the designers is naievity, plain and simple.
As for 100,000 units, yeah, that was probably a mistake. Australia only has 22 million people. No idea why I arbitrarily picked 100,000.
The costings at the end are off. Testing is much less that $5/unit for these kind of things, for example. Usually you'll have a common testbench across all products - it'll be much lower per unit, and not tied to a particular model. Also, retailers aren't the only ones in the pricing process - as I say above, wholesalers/distributors and transport also get figured into the cost. It all adds up. Marketing costs are mostly borne by the retailer portion of the price, as the wholesale channel marketing is much more limited and cost-effective (no tv or radio spots, print one catalogue and you're fine for a quarter/year, run a more niche website only for retailers, etc)
The Australia-limited market thing is less of an issue - a kettle will have a market wider than this. But kettles generally last a long time, and there are hundreds of models out there. Though to honest, after a friend's horror story of one day finding a cockroach in her kettle that had been boiled white, I'm much keener on glass kettles now...
Never mind the $39 kettle. Totaled over ten years, the $150 kettle's seemingly-tiny advantages in reliability, capacity, features, and style over the $10 kettle can be worth way more than its $140 price premium.
That's 10 million total market in the US (100 x .1) and about 16 million in the UK (~20 x .8).
So 26 million total market with a level 1/10th per year or 2.6 million kettles per year. At 100k run per year per manufacturer, the market can then support 26 different models easily.
On the second point, It seemed that he was adding the 2x retail markup into his figures. If you'd followed the link on amazon, you'd see that $90 was market down from about $200.
Sometimes it's best to ask "what would you have to believe for this to be right" before you tear into someone for faulty analysis. All of his number easily pass my smoke tests.
Of course, they cost quite a bit less on average in the UK.
When our last electric kettle blew up 3-4 years ago, we decided to go with a good, old fashioned metal kettle that we use on the hob. Works well, doesn't ever break, and even makes it a bit more of an 'event' to put the kettle on as you get all the boiling sounds, the whistle going off, etc.
My parents, on the other hand, have a thing that produces boiling water at the touch a button so they just use that to dump water into their mugs instead.
Either way, an electric kettle is far from the only solution .
I feel like there needs to be some ceremony to the tea making, it cant just be pored from a tap there needs to be some kind of wait preceding it.
I am well aware what the English drink, being one of them and all!
You mean those old fashioned kettles that are little more than a pot that you put on the hob? Nope. No way do 20% of UK houses have that sort of old fashioned system. That's like claiming 20% of UK houses still have outhouses and don't have indoor toilets.
It always amazes me how the ridiculuous old fashioned non-electric kettles are still popular in USA.
If you have a hot water-based appliance the coffee maker offers far greater convenience. Now you have even less reason for a kettle.
Nonetheless, I don't find it so farfetched. We are a wellish-to-do gadget heavy household and we're content with a gas kettle. Other people continue to drive manual transmission cars. Some people even use Internet Explorer! It's a funny old world.
It's what I use for preparing hot water, and I have no issue with it. That's when I want tea or french-press coffee [2]. Sometimes I use an electric percolator[3] for coffee, and what a cup it can make!
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Teakettle-Litres-Whistling-X...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Bodum-Brazil-French-Coffee-34-Ounce/dp...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Presto-02811-12-Cup-Stainless-Coffee/d...
240v 13a is handy for things like kettles.
Nope, it's a hilarious anacronism. Like seeing a washboard to hand wash your clothes. :)
(I'm originally from the UK, but I adapted pretty quickly when I moved to the US and saw the price of electric kettles).
Having said that I've bought only two kettles in my life, once in 1998 when I bought my first flat and realized I didn't own one - all prior rental properties came with one - and one last year when that died.
I remember spending far too much time picking up kettles in John Lewis, and other "fancy" stores, because I knew I'd be using it multiple times a day for many years and wanted something that looked and felt nice.
One thing that I find genuinely amazing is that power-companies can spot when there are commercial-breaks in TV programs by people in the country making tea en masse:
I buy them, and treat them as throwaway. They seem to last as long as £30 ish kettles, so why bother spending more? My cheapo ones last about a year, then I just get a new one. Awful for the environment, but there you go.
It seems inconceivable to me that a US house might not have a microwave (even unfurnished apartments I rented from slumlords in college came with microwaves), but apparently many do not: http://www.eia.gov/emeu/recs/appliances/appliances.html
The only exception to that could well be from recent immigrants. They may not be in to tea in the same way, and may not be so wedded to the kettle. Even then, one British thing immigrants quickly pick up, possibly to help integrate, its drinking tea.
In short, dont mess with the British and our tea.
Oh, BTW.
Im British, I can't stand tea. Nasty foul bitter bile. Who the hell likes this stuff? Surely only sadists actually like tea? I like coffee.....
Mnay teas are not at all bitter. Did you only try the cheap tea? PG Tips, Tetley, Typhoo, that sort of thing? The cheap stuff is horrible.
Seriously, though: never saw the point. I do all my cooking from scratch, and heat up leftovers on the stove. Once every few months I find myself doing something where it would be more convenient to have a microwave, but it’s no more often than I find myself wishing I had a sous-vide cooker or a bread machine or electric kettle or any number of other kitchen gadgets. We have a smallish kitchen, and I’d rather have more counter space to work on when I’m cooking.
Also despite what the article claims, water doesn't boil at one temperature, if you program a PID or whatever to keep on firing until the water hits 100C you'll be in for a bit of a surprise in Denver or some mountain towns which are much higher than Denver. I know Big Sky MT is about 9000 ft ASL, water boils at 190F or so.
On my microwave, it takes about 96,000 joules (800W x 2') to heat up a plate with leftovers, while doing it on my oven it takes around 432,000J (1800W * 4').
It's one of the best ways to cook many green vegetables, for example, and also makes remarkably good poached eggs:
http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/inside-our-kitchen/ar...
An oven, a microwave, and a fridge are the three appliances I have been able to count on always being present when I move in somewhere. Typically the microwave is build into the cabinetry.
When I redo the kitchen, I’ll add a range hood, but the next owner will also be buying a house without a microwave.
OTOH, I'm told it's common in other parts of the country (I'm in the upper Midwest) to take major appliances when you move.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262020/Humble-kettl...
It's unclear from that article what "ownership" means, given that a kettle is a household-level item, I'm not sure if it would matter if you did your survey as "do you own a kettle" or "is there a kettle in your house" -- they should sum up to about the same percentage. Maybe a smaller percentage of the population would say they own a kettle than would say they have one in their house due to different interpretations of what it means to "own" something. I'd expect those differences to be within the margin of error of most surveys.
Sure, but I was surprised by how low the figure was. I would have expected it to be more like 90-95%.
We do love our tea.
Another good use is dual-core boiling. When I need boiling water for cooking, I put some water in a pot and turn on the stove. But I also put water in my 2 kW electric kettle and will have boilng water within a few minutes.
But these days my kettle is almost solely used as a stand-by "tea making device" :)
Boy they got a lot of stick for that.
Strangely, almost all of them are pictured with their spout pointing to the left. It's a bit like a Where's Wally, trying to find one oriented for the left-handers amongst us.
Just bought our 3rd kettle in 7 years after the previous one developed a leak (and the one before that, the on switch liked to fall off)
No way. I've never seen an electric tea kettle. Tea kettles, sure; but not electric ones. I don't believe anywhere near 10% of US households have one.
We've got plenty of bread machines, waffle irons, electric skillets, toaster ovens, crock pots, and every possible variety of coffee maker, espresso machines, rice cookers, etc. So we're not adverse to electric appliances.
Myself, I've got a stovetop kettle that I never use. If I want tea, I heat water in the microwave.
> "The kettle had caused the trip. It was no longer safe to use the kettle"
> You know enough to start designing a temp. controlled kettle, and yet you overlooked the simple (and most likely) possibility that the kettle was on the same circuit with another high draw appliance (hair dryer, electric heater, etc.) and the combination of the two resulted in the trip from overload. And that there was nothing in fact wrong with the kettle at all.
We sometimes forget that our hacker minds can be a weakness :)
A kettle might cause a branch circuit to trip - but the whole house??? If that happens you have bigger problems than a kettle.
(Plus in the UK plugs have built in fuses should trip first. So it's pretty doubtful it was the kettle.)
No it wouldn't.
You could stick the bare wires of a branch circuit in water and it wouldn't trip the main breaker.
The main breaker will trip if there is a short inside the panel (which is all but impossible unless you are working on it live - which is sometimes done). Or if you used so much electricity you simply overloaded it, but if you did that you have the wrong panel for your house (or you are running some crazy equipment - arc furnace, maybe).
Generally the wiring goes: mains input -> 1 or more RCDs -> several circuit breakers -> several outlets -> fuse in plug -> appliance.
So a grounding fault can take out many circuits, and many-lots of sockets.
That must cause so many nuisance trips - doesn't seem like a good idea (kinda like the ring circuit that to this day causes trouble).
In the US you can have an RCD (called a GFCI here) in the panel, but it feeds a single branch.
RCDs are expensive, so the most common solution is to have two RCDs, each protecting half of the circuits.
It has a split in the bus, so there are two RCDs, one on the left with a couple of breakers and one on the right with the rest of the breakers, and a separator in the middle.
Like:
supply in -> R-B-B | B-B-B-B-B-R <- supply in
C R R | R-R R R R C
neutral -> D-K-K | K-K-K-K-K-D <- neutral
Also, @alextingle, I didn't know that you were meant to have two separate circuits, although that makes sense. Lots of things are required to be RCD protected in the UK, so as you say, it makes sense just to put everything behind an RCD. We don't get any nuisance trips, which I attribute to a generally higher standard of wiring, earthing etc. in the UK, although that could just be jingoism :) (I did once live in the US and some of the literally fraying wiring connected to two pin sockets with no earthing in the house I lived in scared me.)
Newer installations will often have an the RCD integrated with the regular circuit breakers, so you get one for each branch (as well as one the covers the entire installation).
Of course, if you buy something from the store and it trips your RCD you know it's got a fault so you return it. And if something old starts tripping your RCD you know it's developed a fault, and you fix it or replace it.
It seems crazy to me, but if they do that, then they do that.
Wrong is relative: here in Portugal we pay a fixed monthly fee that is proportional to the maximum load. Having the "right" panel may cost you more even if you use less electricity, so many people choose to carefully manage their loads instead.
http://www.ctm.co.uk/gallery/Electric/Electric_photo_gallery...
RCDs detect the slightest earth leak, so they are far more likely to trip than the MCB or the fuse on the plug, which only detect a sustained over-current.
It would lead to much fun as we reset the RCD and then tried each appliance to figure out which one was faulty.
If the kettle still works, then problem solved.
If the ($10) kettle is broken, then I'm going to say that it's entirely possible to consider that quality of components, design, and build may account for the difference between a $10 and a $40 kettle.
I often end up spending more on something if I have reasonable evidence it will last longer and/or perform better. And I don't write long articles about how I resent spending the "extra" money.
Is PID control all that expensive? Aren't you talking about a microcontroller, a thermocouple, and a relay?
That said, a PID controller for my espresso machine cost about $200, but that was everything packaged in nicely.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Budget-Surface-Pipe-Thermometer-/3...
However, a bimetallic strip rated to switch the current directly is likely an order of magnitude cheaper.
Quality control in a typical product is really a bigger deal than most hackers think. He didn't account for the fact that if you go to china or hong kong and contract a manufacturing organisation to build your kettle, it's very likely you'll get your first shipment, coming in on your boat or plane and half the kettles are dead or defective or dangerous on arrival. There's nothing to do with those but throw them out, or maybe sell them back over to india for recycling, and the cost of those lost sales is built into the price of the not defective kettles.
The maths here assumes you have no shipping costs and no defective products, no manufacturing problems and no price fluctuations. Doesn't seem very realistic.
The bimetallic approach can be extended to select temperature. An analogue dial can adjust the switch cutoff position (or alternatively, the starting angle of the bimetallic strip) with a screw. All you'd need to do is calibrate the dial, and the added cost shouldn't be more than 50 US cents on the end retail price.
IMO the reason a "good" kettle costs $90+ is because there isn't enough demand to create enough competition and support enough production to amortize the fixed costs. It's essentially a market broken apart into two of Porter's three fundamental strategies, cost leadership and differentiation. The cheapest kettles would be uncompetitive with a temperature selector even if it added only pennies, while the differentiated kettles have specific features for smaller, less cost sensitive markets. Most people simply don't need temperature selection.
Here's a bimetallic adjustable thermostat: http://catalog.selcoproducts.com/item/adjustable-controls/ad...
I'd be willing to make a large bet that a majority of people who brew both coffee and tea do so using boiling water or close to it. Black tea (breakfast tea) is best made with freshly boiled water, while I find coffee made with anything below 90C to be too weak - I generally use water made shortly off the boil when I'm using an Aeropress.
I have zero doubt digital thermostats are more accurate. That wasn't the point.
That said, the adjustable bimetallic solution is certain worth a try, it might just work good enough and be far cheaper and much more reliable in the long run.
In reality, it's likely that either a) these things are being sold at massive profit margins or b) they're being produced very inefficiently with lots of waste in the production process.
That said, I think the kettle thing is mostly a). Companies will price things highly because they've found that people will pay that much, I reckon it's as simple as that.
This is not correct. The boiling point of water is a function of atmospheric pressure [1]. Weather changes the atmospheric pressure by up to 50mbar, which translates to a couple degrees of variation in the boiling point.
The pressure variation due to height is even more severe [2]. At an elevation of 3000m the atmospheric pressure is typically only 700mbar, which means that water boils at 90 degrees.
How does the basic bimetallic strip know the outside pressure and the boiling-point-curve of water so that is knows when to stop the kettle?
I don't think it knows anything about that. Instead I assume once the water starts boiling, the bubbling steam-"padding" around the heating element lowers the heat transfer rate from the heating element to the liquid. This means that the heating element will quickly get a lot hotter until it reaches the threshold temperature of the bimetallic switch.
[1] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/boiling-point-water-d_926....
I thought there is electronics which simply detects not only absolute temperature, but also change. Once the temperature stops changing and is around 100 degrees, it will stop.
Bagged tea is shit tea. Good tea doesn't cost a large sum of money. Good tea tastes better if you don't burn it. Before you ask - yes I'm an Englishman ;)
Also good tea is still cheap tea - only a few cents a cup.
Black tea with milk is the traditional way of drinking Tea in the UK, so no - I really don't think most people give a shit about what you think. It's a cultural thing and would be like me criticising an Indian for eating a hot Curry or a German for their strict beer making codes.
Using the word "ruins" wasn't meant to be criticizing, it was meant to be playful tongue in cheek. My own mother takes her tea "the British way," that's what tea was in her family when she was growing up, and I tease her about it. However, I have expanded her taste for tea lately and she has thanked me for it.
>Would you worry as much about coffee?
There's plenty of people who appreciate coffee for coffee. I am not one of them. As much as I try, coffee isn't good to me, the flavor isn't something I can enjoy. I do enjoy flavored fake creamer though, so I add that (probably too much if it...) and cut the actual coffee flavor to something creamy and flavored I can drink. In which case, it doesn't matter the quality of the coffee, it can be the shit cheap stuff or the $50 a pound expensive stuff, I'm covering up the true coffee flavor and I can't appreciate a difference. It's kinda a guilty pleasure, I admit...
It isn't about what I think, I was strictly speaking that one can't say there is no difference in high quality tea and low quality tea while putting milk and sugar in it, as you aren't really tasting the tea flavor at that point.
I am also not worried about anything.
White, green, oolong or really any kind good black tea might require less than boiling temperatures to extract enough out of tea while preserving the taste or other wished effects of the tea. The temperatures, amount and the steep time might be different by each specific tea or batch.
So a kettle with a temperature control can be helpful and save time with tea or cooking if you want finer control than boiling - not boiling.
Really, this is an overengineered solution.
Different teas require different water temperatures AND different steeping times for the best taste. Generally the less oxidized the tea the lower the water temperature. I find the worst offense is most Americans over steep their tea which makes it very bitter!
People who use a thermometer are very serious. I just guesstimate.
Also, get some high quality tea, the difference in taste is amazing and its not that expensive, only a few cents a cup.
Also - you can reuse tea leaves.
Re-using tea bags (in the UK & Ireland) is a sign of someone who's very cheap and doesn't want to spend any money. Like someone who cuts their own hair to save money.
You're supposed to let the first brew fill the smelling cup[0], and drink the second brew, but I drink both
[0] http://the-chinese-tea-company.com/teaware/tea-cups/blue-bat... on how the smelling cup looks like
In reality, expensive kettles are like expensive clothes. They are probably made out of better materials, but the rest is just markup to cover the lower volumes and higher marketing costs. And because people will pay it for a brand name and sleek design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_2#Crew_and_accommoda...
Bonus, it looks cool to see the water start to form bubbles and then to go into a full on boil!
I don't like the idea to getting burned on my kettle. So if anyone is looking for a kettle that should be metal, invest in one with double walls if you want it for the "look" or one that has palstic outside if you want it for the "taste". Having cheap metal kettle is much worse than having even cheaper plastic one in my opinion.
Also, electric kettles aren't really a thing in the US. Almost everybody uses the stovetop kind.
I guess the author is saying "kettle is a kettle is a kettle" (except for price, certain design features that don't really count).
One thing they left out of the estimate was the cost of passing national electrical safety regulator test regimes. As anyone who has actually produced new electronics can tell you, this can often be an expensive PITA... particularly for lower-volume products. 100,000 is not high volume.
Please contribute your kettle hack ideas in this thread.
A kettle where it doubles as other things. There are a wide variety of essentially similar cooking appliances (pressure cookers, slow cookers, kettles, Iranian-style rice cookers with crispyness-control, standard or Chinese-style rice cookers, stovetops, etc.) which should be possible to combine more elegantly than the wasteful duplication of the present.
I have a zojirushi, but only with three temperature settings. Maybe I should mod it to fully variable... although I really want to make a teapot with a built in thermometer more than anything. The water heater wouldn't cool fast enough to really make the variable temp worth it.
In regards to the $45 variable temperature kettle. The folks at steepster probably didn't care for it because the temperature range is pretty narrow. For high-quality tea, 175-212F simply isn't a wide enough range. It's also not very precise. Many delicate green teas are best prepared at temperatures as low as 140F and in some cases just a few degrees can make a difference.
I guess in the UK they are counted as a necessity and are cheap :P
IIRC we paid ~£25 after discount. The best value, of those I found, excluding aesthetics was ~£22 .
For over 200 years, no less: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip . It's cute how he seems to think this is a novel solution.
Because it's reasonably durable decorative item so theres no shortage of people willing to part with their money because it's just 5 times as expensive but 100 times prettier.
The cheap ones are for people that just want faucet. Quality is pretty much the same.
I imagine it has to do with scaling, discoloration, and/or lifetime. I have stayed with my old stovetop kettle until now, simply because it has no plastic/silicone/rubber in contact with the water.
The pot still works fine. The gasket hardened and cracked, but Zojirushi USA sells parts online. It was about $10 for a new one.
It is overkill if you don't use it all that much (we use and refill at least once a day). But if you're a hardcore hot beverage drinker, it's truly the Cadillac of kettles.
The instructions say to dump the water out every day and start fresh in the morning. I don't do that, because I am too lazy.
For best tea, you should only use water that has been boiled once (since reaching an equilibrium with dissolved oxygen at/below room temperature)
Appliances like these are generally 2-prong and therefore not connected to safety ground. Rather they are supposed to be "double insulated" for protection.
It is gotten to the point where I get a twitch whenever I see someone refer to the PID concept. In most cases it gets used in an inappropriate way.
Obviously, not all places have stoves - but every place I've wanted to make hot water in has - or a microwave/
Giving the retail markup of say 50% and wholesale markup of say 30%, the difference at the manufacturer of $90 vs. say $50 becomes $31 vs. $17 ($10 vs $5 BOM :)
Also, who doesn't have a cheap kettle? (I actually have a £20 one, because I wanted a high wattage so it boils quicker, but in my defense I got it free with nectar points[1]. It is still plastic and the on/off LED broke within a week, but it boils enough water for my enormous free hackathon mug in like a minute.)
[1] If you didn't know that Argos accepts nectar points, you're welcome. I have never paid for a kettle or microwave.
Well, if you are at sea level, that is.
All the above is why you sometimes hear people talking about shorting their supply chains because it means lower trade prices, which in turn allows for increased profits, an increased ability to compete on price, or both.
They cost what they cost due to product differentiation and similar.
Also "PID tuning"? What would there be to tune? There's some serious overcomplication going on here.
It costs that much because I'd rather pay $200 than spend my weekend making a kettle (producer surplus). Next thing you know someone will be wondering why drinks cost $10 for $1-2 worth of ingredients.
If you want to save money just use a pot and boil the water in that, it's not like you really need a purpose built device for boiling water.
You'll save between $2.50 and $5.00 per year boiling one cup of water per day.
It sure looks slicker, futuristic and trendy, but it's nothing but a gimmick. Also, who needs to browse the web on a car? But I digress.
These figures are just arbitrary. Weakens his argument.
2. Why does anyone need or even want a kettle with a PID controller? Does he know that people used to boil water over a fire?
Because that's the price the market will bear for X. Cost has nothing to do with it. If I could sell you a kettle for $100,000 that cost me $100 to build, I would absolutely do it.
Right, micros and temperature sensors are really expensive these days, especially at mass-production volumes.
> But that is just rather silly, given that an analogue solution works better.
tab closed
Do you have any reasons those statements bothered you or are you just a pro-digital kind of guy?
You could easily implement thousands of PID controllers sufficient for this application on a $3 microcontroller with a $2 thermistor. Those are sparkfun prices, so 1/2 that would not be unreasonable for a BOM estimate. Sundry connectors and power transistors would cost more, but those will be present in the analog version as well. Temperature proofing is unnecessary - the sparkfun thermistor is rated to 125C and you can trade latency for max temp by moving it away from the heated parts. In this application you can afford to trade truckloads of latency.
Also, this is not a project for 3EEs + 2 technicians, this is a project for 1 bored EE in an afternoon. I suspect calibrating the digital version would be 10x-100x easier on an industrial scale.
I have no idea why or how he thinks the analog version would work better, so I can't really counter-argue.
On a separate note, the price jumps from $16 to $45 going from the analog to digital version, though as far as I can see the only digital-specific additions are the EEs ($7) and PID controller ($10).
As for your separate note, I noticed that inconsistency as well. I never figured it out, although by that point I was ~70% sure the whole analysis was botched so I didn't spend too much time thinking about it.