Seriously, have you ever been in North America? Just go into literally any big box retailer and find the 50 foot long shelves full of electric kettles. Or go to an online retailer, say Amazon, and find hundreds and hundreds of them. Virtually every major brand makes electric kettles, they all seem to work just fine, and they don’t take 27 minutes to boil water.
They're exaggerating. But your typical North American electric kettle is—ballpark—twice as slow as a European kettle.
Your standard North American sockets provide half the voltage but not double the amperage, so they're half as powerful.
But that's kinda academic if nobody sells kettles that have the North American 240V plug.
You'd need an extra conductor of wire than is there in the cable for a standard 240V outlet. (Hot1, Hot2, Neutral, Gnd).
You can run a Hot1/Hot2 240V circuit with existing 14/2 romex, but odds are that whatever feeds the outlet in your kitchen also feeds many other outlets, and you don't want them all to be 240V.
Note North America doesn't use ring circuits like the UK.
Similarly, even with good insulation, a combi boiler is more efficient than having a hot water tank.
whatever happened to the guy, i was a fan of his videos then he stopped posting a few years back...
electroboom seems to be covering a similar niche, so that's good though.
It's great for boiling water for cooking; at 230V it's faster than heating on the hob. But if it took 7–8 minutes, that'd be frustrating.
I typically don’t even keep track of how long it takes to boil on the stove. I just do the rest of the prep work.
A power boil option would be a decent alternative.
I'm probably just impatient, to be fair.
They are definitely 100% available to buy. However, they cost more and seem to be of lower quality than the range available in the UK.
I suspect the voltage difference is the underlying reason. If you have a gas burner then an old fashioned stovetop kettle is almost as fast as an electric kettle in the US.
https://www.target.com/s/kettle
I’ve been using this $25 kettle for many years now:
https://www.target.com/p/hamilton-beach-1l-electric-kettle-s...
The cord is “6 inches” (it’s actually 24 inches on my cheap kettle) because most kitchens in the US have many power outlets at the countertop, where the kettle sits. It would be annoying to deal with excess wire.
Rant aside, apparently a large part of the problem is because North America uses 110v at the wall. Quick explanation here[0]. As mentioned in the linked article, many houses here also have a separate high voltage line for washing machines. Perhaps they should have a high voltage kettle line.
[0] http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2012/04/16/why-kettles-boil-slow...