This seemed like a wild claim (2500 watts for a tea kettle!? As much as a microwave oven in full blast?) so I looked it up. Wow.

It's actually only americans who unaccountably make do with these horribly underpowered kettles. The rest of the world wants their tea and they want it now...

Technology Connections did an excellent video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c

tl;dw -- kettles in the U.S. only take about 4+ minutes to boil a liter of water. So when you say "now" you really mean it.

I live in the US and have an induction stovetop. It can dump 3600 watts of targeted heat into a pot of water. It can boil 2 liters of water in ~3-5 minutes.

Plus, when you reduce the heat the heat reduces almost immediately.

Nothing else compares with the speed it works that I've ever used before. Definitely worth the upgrade in time saved at the stove.

I just nuke a mug of water for a minute or two when I'm making instant coffee. I never understood the big deal about electric kettles.

A water kettle lets you consistently heat water to the same temperature (not just boiling, high-end kettles have additional temperature options), regardless of:

- Amount of water

- Initial temperature of water

- Position of water container

They also prevent superheated water accidents.

Yes and: Kettles are much easier to clean than microwave (interiors).

Well our kettle is 2.4kW, our microwave is 800W or so effectively. Also our induction stovetop is much faster, so the nuking option is slowest by a lot.

Boiling water in a microwave does not make the microwave dirtier.

In fact if it boils it can help clean it!

True. The mess comes from a son reheating food, often tomato sauce based, without a lid.

most lid are plastics, so i suggest people heating without lids. Cleaning mwave is east anyway. I am sure ppl don't want microplastic laden food.

Better that than reheating it in a kettle!

Microwaving has the undesirable side-effect of also heating the exterior of your beverage's vessel.

Electric kettles make it easy to pour for pour over.

When the other options just need to be poured, waiting 4.5 minutes for boiling alone is a significant waste of time.

You can improve that by using less water, but I would still like to double the power.

Interesting what power do microwaves in US deliver. In EU the regular micros are about 900W range give or take 200W (that is 1500W from wall because microwaves are not efficient machines) but kettles have usually range 2200..3000. So it is obvious why everyone uses kettles. I myselft have 3kW one and it heats 0.35 litres to boiling in 51 seconds. To have similar microwave it would have to be 3000W micro that is 4500W from wall and have not seen that kind of monsters, also regular 1 phase EU socket delivers max 3600W so that limits it also.

A typical US microwave draws 900-1100 watts too. I can't even find a 2000-watt microwave listed for sale in the usual consumer places. That'd be like a "pro chef" level luxury item, likely needing beefier electrical wiring and so on. US electric code requires a dedicated 20-amp circuit for microwave, which isn't supposed to serve a 2000-watt load.

> it is obvious why everyone uses kettles. I myselft have 3kW one and it heats 0.35 litres to boiling in 51 seconds.

Wh? It’s definitely less hassle, and maybe faster, to fill a cup/mug and stick that in the microwave

Than it is to fill a cup, pour that into the kettle, boil it, then pour it back in the cup. Or you have to put more water into the kettle than you need, because you can’t measure it accurateLet, and then it takes longer to boil

Standard wall outlet in the US is 15 amps, so a maximum of 1800 watts. 20 amp outlets (which can supply 2400 watts) are getting common, but I've seen very few home appliances that actually use the extra amperage (as determined by having a plug keyed for such an outlet).

The back of the envelope comparison isn't difficult. The energy in different forms are doing the same thing.

Doesn't your microwave heat a cup of water in about the same amount of time as a tea kettle? And most tea kettles are bigger than one cup.

Now, think about concentrating the same amount of energy to heat up your eyeball. Or worse, concentrated into a tiny point on your eyeball.

Brits don’t mess around with tea I guess. I believe they’re mostly on 240v even for residential there. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think it would even be possible to heat water that fast in the US on 120v.

Correct, it takes about twice as long to boil a kettle in the US. But the US is the anomaly here. Most countries use 220-240V mains like Britain [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country#T...

British outlets are individually fused so they're typically rated for more current

British outlets are fused for _lower_ current than american outlets, not more: 13 amps instead of the 15 or 20 that's common here. It's the voltage that's higher, which means that the power transferred for a given current is about double.

Fused for 13A running off 32A ring main.

Continental Europe uses 16A radial circuits so the current rating is higher there.

EDIT: Of course, you can't run two kettles on one radial, but you can on one ring.

Technically, the US does as well.

You have 240 V at the panel, but you only run half for each common circuit.

Technically basically all buildings in Germany (residential and commercial) run on 400V 3 phase power. But access to it via sockets is only common in residential homes via sockets in a garage. It gets more common with car charging although they rather use 3 x 230V as far as I am aware of.

Fun fact: 400V 3-phase and 3x 230V are the very same thing. You'll get 230V AC between Neutral and each of the three phases, but the AC voltage between two of the phases will actually be 400V.

I'm living in apartment block built in 2016 in eastern EU and here every apartment has a separate 3 phase(5 pin) socket for the stove. It is a 7kw beast, it can easily destroy regular aluminum-steel pan if you put it on max heat. Steel part will fall apart.

Same in Eastern Germany, at least up to the 2000s. (Probably still, but I left, so can't vouch.)

I seem to remember our electrical stove and oven back in Germany in the 2000s using three-phase power.

Here in Singapore I think our pool pump uses three phase power, too. (Our plugs and outlets here in Singapore follow the British model.)

They have a man watch the telly to hit the button to turn on the power for all the teapots going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA

That poor operator probably gets an adrenaline rush (and finger twitch) every time he hears the Eastenders theme tune.

Assuming perfect energy transfer (fairly reasonable for conductive heating of water) with no losses to ambient, a starting temperature of 20 C, 1 L of water (which I assume to weigh 1 kg) and a 1800W kettle (the max you’ll find in America): no.

t = specific heat capacity of water * mass of water * degC deltaT / power

4.186 J/gC 1000g * 80C / 1800 J/s ~= 186 seconds

Higher, that would be quite an extraordinary microwave (probably too high) - 800W to 1kW at maximum typically.

(I use mine mostly on the 90W or 180W settings, for defrosting.)

I recently bought a 3500 watt electric kettle out of the bargain bin in LIDL, for around 20 euros. Europeans do not mess around when it comes to hot beverages

Yeah funny, i was going to say 2.5 kW kettles are a britishism and the ones on continental europe are weaker...

... but then i checked my eastern european kettle and guess what, it's ... 2.4 kW.

> This seemed like a wild claim (2500 watts for a tea kettle!? As much as a microwave oven in full blast?) so I looked it up. Wow.

Almost all household appliances that heat (and specifically heat food or water) will operate at the limit of what your house can supply.

So that's about 1800 Watt in the US and about 3500 Watt in most of the rest of the world.

It's only natural that you see almost any (heating) appliance cluster around these numbers.

(I'm actually not quite sure where you would see 2500 Watt kettles. Perhaps some are deliberately neutered a bit, so that you don't blow a fuse in case you have anything else on that circuit?

Keep in mind that in the UK, but not in eg France or Germany, every plug also has its own fuse.)

I found it odd that in the US most home brewers don't use electric, but as you say they are limited by the elements they can use.

Here in the UK, my home brew beer set up has a 3000w option - great for boiling 25 litres of water/wort - that said it came with a EU plug with some sort of 'fancy' UK plug convertor. After about 4 years the plug started to get so hot that it melted a socket or two - I found that inside the convertor the connection between the EU plug and the UK was really thin, which was causing it to heat up.

I cut off the end of the cable and rewired it to a heavy duty UK plug - it has been perfect since then - and no longer over heats.

Electric is growing in popularity. It’s not overly expensive (compared to the cost of the gear, anyway) to get a dedicated 30A or 50A 240V circuit installed; or you can brew next to your washer/dryer, since there is nearly always a 240V circuit available there.

> I found it odd that in the US most home brewers don't use electric, but as you say they are limited by the elements they can use.

Yes, but you still see electric space heaters. And they essentially all also have the same wattage: the limit of what they can get.

british household AC is wild, it's like they've got a full-power american range plug for every outlet

Not just UK, the whole world except North America and Japan.

South african plugs are rated 16A @240V. Thats a safe 3.5kW at each and every plug socket in the house.

> Not just UK, the whole world except North America and Japan.

Brazil is also an exception. The standard socket is only 10A (with a 20A alternative for things like air conditioners), and the voltages vary depending on the city (and the building, and location within the building); you might have 110V, 115V, 127V, 220V, 230V, and perhaps others I have missed (I went in more detail about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40385851). I live in a 127V/220V area, so my single-phase sockets are 10A @ 127V, for a total of only 1.3kW each.

So it's pretty normal for a "230v" plug to actually be anything between 220v and 240v. Voltages fluctuated pretty wide depending on location. It's all down to the loca transformers.

But mixing 100s of volts with 200s of volts sounds mad. I presume you had the special plug for your 200 range outlets? Does Brazil also have split phase AC like the US?

> I presume you had the special plug for your 200 range outlets?

The same type of socket is used for "110V" (usually 127V) and "220V", sometimes in the same building, sometimes right next to each other. The "220V" socket might be colored red, or might have a sticker saying "220V" glued next to it, but don't count on it. The only difference is between the 10A and the 20A, the pins on the 20A plug are slightly thicker and don't fit in the 10A socket (the opposite works fine).

But at least, it's better than a couple of decades ago: on top of all that, back then we didn't even have a plug and socket standard. It was a mix of several types, including a "universal" socket which looked like the common USA socket but could also accept plugs with round pins, and all of them (including the USA standard sockets) could be used for both "110V" and "220V". The new plug and socket standard is great; it's better than the USA standard, since a partially pushed plug won't expose live pins (and it's also slightly smaller, allowing for denser power strips). It's unfortunate that they didn't also modify the European standard they used as a base to add keying for the different voltages (while allowing a universal plug for things which can work on both voltages), but I understand that trying to do too much could make it politically unfeasible to mandate the new standard.

> Does Brazil also have split phase AC like the US?

It's more common to have three-phase AC (that is, between phase and neutral is 127V and between a pair of phases is 220V), but we also have some places with split phase (for instance, 110V between phase and neutral and 220V between a pair of phases).

I remember watching a Technology Connections video where he was looking at space heaters rated for small/medium/large rooms and pointing out that the medium/large room heaters were both 1500kW (iirc) as it’s the maximum continuous draw from a US socket.

Over here in NZ we get pretty similar ratings on the same style heaters, but the large room ones are 2400kW because we can get that from any socket.

Also with my hobby - sewing. A lot of people in North America talk about forgetting they left the iron on, but I switch it on and off every time because it heats up in 30 seconds - less if it’s been on recently.

And because nearly every single house in UK is wired for single phase only, your connection to the grid is usually rated at 80-100amps(so a regular British home can draw around ~20kW on a single phase).

And just like Americans have special access to 'full-power', there's special access to three phase 400 V in many nominally 230V countries, too.

That's eg common for electric stoves in your kitchen.

When we discuss laser power, damage begins in the milliwatts range, so those of us in the hobby prefer to state it like that so we can easily give people an idea of how fucked they can be if they treat a laser like a toy.

2.5 billion microwatts.

Sure but how many millijoules per day is that?

216 billion.

<twitches in metric prefix>

60 micrometres. "micron" is a deprecated irregular word that is unlike every other scaling of the metre.

Listen, our shoe sizes are measured in barleycorns, so we’re doing the best we can to adopt metric in places.

Correct me if I'm wrong "micron" IS metric (decimal based system) but it's NOT an SI unit?

Eh. At least this one is just a name. I don't know how precise we have to be in a blog post, you know? They're the exact same unit.