I have somehow got in the habit of  thinking that if I have something that I just need to heat to maximum with no subtlety, I put it on the big burner on maximum. For example – boiling water for perogies, rice, tea, etc.

Since our recent deeper exploration of tightwaddery, I have reconsidered. If the pot or kettle is smaller than the big burner, it won’t capture most of the heat. I might speed up my boil time slightly by having heat waft up around the sides of my kettle, but I bet it doesn’t cut my heating time in half.

I do actually plan on timing it soon just because I love empirical measurement and having real data. I’ll update you when I know that for sure.

But additionally, today I have worked out that my kettle + the ideal amount of water for two cups of tea weighs 4 lbs 1 ounce. So now we can be easily be sure we’re not wasting energy on boiling more water than we need every evening. That vintage kitchen scale is pretty much paying for itself!

Haha, kidding about that one. I broke down the numbers.

A small burner uses about 1200 watts, so for every 50 minutes not boiling we save 1 kilowatt-hour at 11.67¢ per kilowatt hour.

Potentially in a month…

With my making two cups of coffee every morning and Ian and I having 2 cups of tea every evening, we could, conceivably be saving 5 minutes each time (depending on how much we typically overfill the kettle)*.

5 minutes * 2 boilings * 30 days / 60 = 5 hours per month

x 1.2 Kw = 6 Kwh/month

x .1167 = $0.70

So saving 70 cents a month, it might be a little while before that scale has paid for itself, but I’m happy with that number. For some reason we always boil way too much or way too little water, so we needed better information anyway. 70 cents a month seems like a reasonable bonus.

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* Something else to time. How long does it take to boil 2 cups vs. a full kettle?