This is from Boris Johnson...
Boris Johnson - Buy a new kettle & save £10 a year on your electricity bill. 👀 pic.twitter.com/IMtIiwJk4k
— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) September 1, 2022
Please can we have competent people running the country, just some times?
So, let's explain...
- An electric heating element, even in an old kettle, is 100% efficient at turning electricity in to heat. All the power used goes to heat. There is no "waste" due to being "inefficient" as waste is heat. [pedants: some very small part may go to light or sound]
- Yes, some of the heat may not go directly in to the water - e.g. the body of the kettle, and the air. A more modern kettle may have a body that holds less energy, depending on the material (e.g. plastic not metal, etc). Again, this is a small part of what is used. Most goes in to the water.
- Being "slow", so taking longer to boil, does not change that - it means that it is using less power (for longer time), but the total will be the same. There is an amount of energy needed to raise a volume of water by an amount of temperature - simple physics. The electrically energy is turned in to heat in the water. For the same volume of water getting hot by the same amount the energy used is the same.
- Even if it was true (LOL), spending £20 to save £10 a year is hardly a newsworthy, or even useful, "tip" in this cost of living crisis - they seriously have no fucking clue do they?
What can help?
Old kettles used to have an element in the water at the bottom, and this had to be covered. It meant the minimum you could boil was more than one cup worth. This is wasted if only making one cup of coffee and leaving the water to go cold*.
New kettles often have an element in the base allowing you to only boil what you need, even if only one cup. That can cut down the power usage for each cup of coffee*.
* Such savings are less useful than they sound as that wasted energy, e.g. leaving a hot kettle of water to cool after making only one cup of coffee - ends up heating your house anyway. It is power used for something useful. It may not be as cheap as gas central heating or overnight storage heating, but it is power used to heat your house, so not entirely wasted in winter.
P.S. It gets worse!
If the walls are well enough insulated, which they should be in a modern house, this makes fuck all difference. Yet again, a basically lack of understanding, and yet again a total waste of time against the costs families are facing, they are fighting fire with water pistols, no - with eye droppers, empty eye droppers!
Martin Lewis’s face when she brings out the fucking tin foil pic.twitter.com/NGW8qou5r9
— James Felton (@JimMFelton) September 5, 2022
