Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dan-robertson 66 days ago
Most people boil too much water. Get a kettle that can take a smaller amount of water and then boil what you need. If that’s not good enough, you can get a kettle that keeps water warm and then you don’t need so much energy to boil it (or figure out a routine or trick to turn the kettle on earlier, eg a teasmade). If you want to throw money at the problem USB-C is not the answer (how does that even make sense??) but you could (a) get a 240V socket (eg NEMA 6-15) in your US kitchen and rewire a 15A 240V European kettle to the appropriate plug. Or get an impulse labs induction hob set. Their whole selling point is using batteries to be able to put more power into boiling water than they can get from the wall.
1 comments
firefax 63 days ago
>If you want to throw money at the problem USB-C is not the answer (how does that even make sense??)

I thought maybe it could use a capacitor or something? I'm not an electrical engineer -- all I know is we have half the voltage here, and I've seen things like USB plates before -- the older type of USB... and USB C can power a laptop.

So I thought, since the English love their goddamn tea so much, they'd probably have a USB-C teakettle if such a thing is possible, and then I wouldn't need an adapter (if an adapter is even possible for higher voltage appliances like that).

Mine takes four minutes. Minutes are short in the morning in America :-(

link
dan-robertson 62 days ago
The voltage isn’t really the limiting thing (you actually get 220 volts to almost any American home for some appliances like A/C or cookers). The issue is that the regular 110V circuits aren’t meant for more than 15A and that then limits the amount of power coming from your wall. If you change the voltage, you’re still bottlenecked by the power from your wall (and it is that power that is almost all turned into heat to boil the water).

A capacitor is too small but you could imagine a kettle with a battery to deliver more power than it can get out of the wall.

I shouldn’t have been snarky about your USB-C comment. I’m sorry.

link