The Power of Tea.

Yesterday I was given a cup of tea, which was nice. Today I measured the time it took to boil two mugs of water as it’s virtually impossible to boil just one in a kettle. (one minute) As the kettle is 3 kilowatts it thus takes 1.5 Kw minutes per mug full. OK so far? Now the person making the tea yesterday filled the kettle to around a litre, enough for around four mugs full so the other three would be left to go cold. I’d guess on average two mug fulls will be left to go cold waiting for the next brew, which is 3 Kw minutes of wasted energy per cup. Now I drink a lot of tea but I’d say on average a typical adult will drink five cups of tea or coffee a day. That’s then 15 Kw minutes wasted energy per adult per day or 0.25 Kw hrs. As this happens most days, say 350 per year, that’s 87.5 Kw hrs per year. OK lets say around 40 million adults are in the habit of drinking five hot drinks per day, that’s 3,500,000,000 Kw hrs per year, which is 3.5 million megawatt hours. Now the Drax power station generates 3,960 megawatts. Times that by hours in a year, 8760, and you get KW hrs/yr and a very big number, 34.6 million megawatt hrs per year as opposed to our 3.5 million. But it does mean that 10% of the energy of our largest power station is being wasted by overfilling electric kettles. So here’s the thing. Turn on the cold tap fully and count the seconds it takes to fill a mug using the tried and tested “thousand and one, thousand and two” method. On ours it’s three. Then fill the kettle on that basis from empty. Keep doing it this way and it will always be near empty, which is fine, and it’ll boil twice as quick too. If you have an old kettle with an element in the water you’ll still have to cover the element and waste energy, but you can begin to see why power stations dread half time in the world cup final.