Different stoves take different amount of time to boil water. Kinda hard to follow the timing directions on the box if you start with cold water.

Hint: There is a direct way to tell if pasta is almost done.

Oooh, maybe we can build a $400 IoT device that requires a $60/month subscription around this idea?

Oh... just tasting a piece of pasta? Never mind.

You could maybe call the device Pastero.

It would need to have several precisely calibrated pressure sensors to test the done-ness of pasta. With machine learning of course.

this might work for you barbarians, but for us italians this a big no-no ;)

Did you confirm with the Chinese?

Wouldn’t that increase the time it takes to get a boil going? Doesn’t that increase the thermal load (or whatever the appropriate term is)?

The term you're looking for is heat capacity. Water has a much higher specific heat capacity (on a per unit of mass basis) than most other everyday materials, and it comprises most of the mass of a pot+water [+pasta] system being heated, so the time and energy required to boil won't be changed significantly by the presence or absence of the pasta.

maybe not? if the water and pasta are at the same temp to start with. I'm assuming heating pasta also takes less energy that heating water.

I suspect that makes it harder to get the timing right, because how long the water takes to heat up varies a lot more than how much it cools down in the first ~10 minutes after turning off the burner.