Hot drinks & kettles

We drink a lot of tea!  This, my son will tell you, is an understatement.

One of the most used items in our house is the kettle.  I think we used it like many people do, before making a cuppa I would fill it to 2/3 full from the cold tap and just click boil.  I didn’t measure out the precise ammount of water I would need for making 2 cups of tea, I just guessed.  And as it turns out I guessed quite badly!

As part of my mission to reduce the ammount  of energy I was wasting I decided to see how much electricity my traditional style 3KW electric kettle used throughout the day.  To do this I plugged the kettle into my energy monitoring smart plug.  I only had one at this point and was using it mainly to see how much power each device was using.  The results were quite shocking to me! On average were using about 3Kwh per day, not much maybe but at 20p per Kwh that soon mounts up!

Old Kettle Energy Usage

When my old kettle died I decided I needed to find a way to only boil the water that I required so I started to look for a more environmentally friendly alternative.  What I settled on was a ‘one cup’ hot water dispenser.  There are many on the market, but the one I decided to go for was the Morphy Richards Redefine 3L Hot Water Dispenser.

It was quite expensive, 4 times what I would normally pay for a kettle!  This kettle allowed me to boil the precise quantity of water I need for each task, from 150ml to 1.5litres.  I now know that one cup = 260ml and 1 cup + 1 mug =540ml.   I once again used my energy monitor plug to work out how much energy we used with the new kettle.  Over a week the average worked out at 0.7kwh per day.

The advantages of this machine are:

• Needs no installation.
• It comes with a water filter, making excellent flavourful tea!
• Saves water as well as electricity.
• Heats water to the temperature you require. It doesn’t have to be boiling!
• Can boil up to a litre and a half of water at a time.

‘One Cup Kettle’ Energy Usage

As you can see from the above tables, taking into account the energy usage, the new ‘One Cup’ kettle paid for itself within 9 months.  We have now had this water dispenser for over 2 years, so I would estimate it has saved us well over £200 in electricity!

Screenshot of Energy Usage - Old Kettle

Screenshot of Energy Usage - New Kettle