Almost universally electric. Remember that (being essential for tea) they may be used many times a day and be found in offices and other places without other cooking facilities.
Unfortunately, you can't make tea correctly with moderately hot water like what you get from some water coolers. The tea won't steep correctly.
Depends on the kind of tea. For black tea, near boiling is good, but for whites and oolongs it's not. Though I suppose the British are famous for black tea.
(I got a electric tea kettle with a built in thermometer not too long ago, so this is an interesting issue for me.)
Depends on the kind of tea. For black tea, near boiling is good, but for whites and oolongs it's not. Though I suppose the British are famous for black tea.
In the UK (& Ireland) "tea" means black tea. You can get fancy teas, but "tea" on it's own just means black tea.
We tried washing our hands with it instead, but that worked out even more poorly. :P Don't worry, the milk (and quite possibly sugar) kills the taste of the black tea nicely.
Well, British Tanks have a tea brewing device [1]:
"Similar to every British tank since the Centurion, and most other British AFVs, Challenger 2 contains a boiling vessel (BV)[citation needed] also known as a kettle or bivvie for water which can be used to brew tea, produce other hot beverages and heat boil-in-the-bag meals contained in ration packs.[9] This BV requirement is general for armoured vehicles of the British Armed Forces, and is unique to the armed forces of the UK."
They would always use electric kettles. The idea of putting (basically) a pot on a stove to boil water sounds like still going outside to an outhouse to go to the toilet.
When renting a house for a holiday in USA once, my family went out to buy an electric kettle to make tea & coffee, and they weren't as common in shops as we thought. That was a weird eye-opener.
We almost universally use electric kettles - to us they are regular kettles.
The US/UK difference is mostly due to the electric supply I think. At 230v with a max draw of 13Amps per socket UK electric kettles boil fast compared to US ones in my experience.
Canadian tea drinker checking in. I've used an electric kettle all my life and don't see what the problem is...
Electric kettles are common here even though we use 110V power. I've never timed it, but I think they can bring cold water to a boil in maybe 3 minutes, which is okay with me.
If electric kettles are rare in the States then I think it's because of a cultural difference, not because of the mains voltage. Sure it would be convenient if kettles boiled faster, but I don't think it makes that much of a difference.
Simply a question of available power. Typical British kettles use 3kW (comfortably doable with 240V@13A); under US power (110V@15A) you can only manage about half that, which means waiting twice as long for your kettle to boil.
(American here) I recently upgraded from a 1kW to a 1.75kW kettle and thought it was a huge improvement. It does trip the circuit breaker if I try to run the toaster at the same time as the kettle though.
Oh, I thought US circuits would be spec'ed at higher amperages to make up for the lower voltage. How does that work for high power appliances then? I have a 10kW induction stove, how could you ever get that kind of power from an installation running at 110V?
Some people put a cordless electrical kettle on a gas stove, and melt the bottom and damage the kettle. Seriously, I've seen this happen a number of times, I've almost done it myself.
Some are mostly metal, which might not help. In any case it's probably something you'd do reflexively, without thinking about the material composition of the kettle at all.
I am English, and was partly mimicking the parent who used "regular kettle" to mean "stove top kettle."
I did grow up with one though. My parents had previously lived in a house with a very small kitchen with no convenient place for an electric kettle. When they moved they kept their stove-top kettle until it burned through (about 10 years) and replaced it with an electric. I bought a stove-top kettle a few years ago for the same reason. It still comes out occasionally when an electric kettle breaks (which is quite often if you live in one of the "hard water" areas of Southern England.)
"when an electric kettle breaks (which is quite often if you live in one of the "hard water" areas of Southern England.)"
The trick is to every now and then turn the kettle on with no water in it. The calcium on the spiral at the bottom of the kettle will break into big chunks and fall off, if you just turn the kettle up side down they will fall out and you'll have a heating element as good as new (don't let it get too hot obviously, as that will damage the heating element and/or kettle itself).
There is a better way: just boil 100-200g of citric acid in a kettleful of water. It will dissolve the limescale with no damage to the heating element.
Yeah but it takes way longer if you need to remove a thick layer of calcium. What you can do is put in vinegar and then turn the kettle on. It improves the effectiveness of the vinegar, but it gets all frothy and stinks up your house. Also if you are are with your face over the kettle when you open it, the vinegar steam or whatever it's called stings in your eyes. So personally, my money is on turning the kettle on with no water :) (well actually my money is on buying a calcium filter, which is what I ended up doing in the end, but apart from that :) )
That will remove limescale from the heating element. Unfortunately some of it also finds its way into the auto-cutoff mechanism, causing it to switch off prematurely (or occasionally fail to switch off.)
But Americans do seem to speak as though their ways were universal, more than other nations. I remember a Canadian who worked near the border expressing her amazement at being asked "do you take normal money?"
Americans, to an absurd degree, are rabidly ethnocentric. I'm not sure why this is; I think it has to do with being the major superpower during the global information explosion era.
I'm speaking as an American myself: I have a very hard time, despite being conscious of it, not thinking of all things American as a baseline for normalcy. I know, intellectually, that American dialects stagnated for centuries after being imported from Britain and eviscerated by Webster, but I still think of "colour" as a foreign and exotic spelling.
I suspect one of the reasons for the popularity of small electrical appliances in Britain is that electricity is traditionally cheaper than gas, which is the opposite of what you'll find on mainland Europe.
> [in Britain] electricity is traditionally cheaper than gas
Rubbish, electricity is around 3x more expensive per KWh than gas in the UK. The UK has traditionally been a big gas exporter, too.
Electric kettles are used for convenience (faster, turns itself off) rather than financial reasons. Most people have little clue about what contributes what to their energy bills, too.
Presumably they are slower in the US because of lower mains voltage (x Amperage).
