Energy Saving Tip # 2 - Boiling the Kettle

I'm sure you all know that boiling more water than you need wastes energy. But how much energy are we all wasting?

In the United Kingdom tea drinking is a national institution, we down a scalding 1909 cups of tea every second, 6.8m every hour, and 165m every day, according to figures from the UK Tea Council. This unsurprisingly uses up alot of energy, a kettle uses up to 3kW of electricity. In an article in by the Times Online blog using a 2.2kw kettle it took 100 seconds to boil. This equates to about 1.68m kWh in electricity consumption to boil the actual water used in cups of tea.

But 67% of people boil more water than is actually required for their cup of tea. I have not been able to find actual statistics for how much they overfill the kettle by other than from a few sites which claim we on average use twice the amount of water than is required. This would mean that we are wasting around 1.68m kWh a day from our tea addiction. Adding in coffee drinkers this extends to 2.33m kWh per day or 1056 tonnes of CO2 a day from electricity use, the equivalent to about 149 000 cars, or an annual 6.36kg of CO2 per capita.

To what cost you may ask; a cool £91m a year.

After computing my back of an envelope figures I found a report by DEFRA on the same topic which suggested a daily energy saving of 3.42m kWh (1547 tonnes per day).

So what can you do to reduce your impact;

• The Eco Kettle
  The innovative Eco Kettle has a unique double chamber that gets you to measure out exactly how much water you want to boil, saving electricity, water, money and time, making it better for the planet... and you still get to have a great cup of tea. That's smart thinking - making the eco kettle one of our favourite eco products, and an essential for any eco friendly kitchen or workplace. Using a kettle to boil more water than you need is the equivalent to powering 300 CFLs unnecessarily.
  
• Referring to the measure on the side can help you to accurately determine the amount of liquid necessary
• Measure how much water you require by filling the cup or saucepan you are planning to use and then pour this water into the kettle, remembering to add a little bit extra to compensate for evaporation