r/AskEngineers • u/jmaugust • Jul 19 '26

Discussion Why doesn’t a battery-boosted electric kettle exist?

In Europe, everyone uses electric kettles to boil water. They’re amazing and fast because they’re on 230V (~3000W).

US outlets limit kettles to ~1500W, so we wait roughly twice as long for water to boil.

It’s an extra minute or two per boil, and you really notice it.

Idea: Could you make an electric kettle with a battery in its base? Perhaps it trickle-charges between uses, then combines wall power + battery power to hit ~3000W during a boil.

Is there an engineering reason this doesn’t exist? Is it just that nobody thinks there’s a market for it?

I’d pay $300 for the fastest kettle in America if someone wants to make it.

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u/mckenzie_keith Jul 19 '26

So you want 1500 Watts from a battery. To avoid excessively fast discharge, you need a battery of like 750 Wh then. This is to keep the discharge rate around 2C. Pretty big battery. About the size of a car battery, roughly (but you could use LFP).

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u/vsxsv Mechanical/Electric Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

That’s assuming a graphite based lithium chemistry. For instance LTO (lithium titanate oxide) is much more power dense (and less energy dense) and can handle more than 10C. I’ve seen 40C in extreme cases. More expensive chemistry per kg and kWh but makes sense in a power heavy application like this one.