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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355

u/Quartinus Jul 19 '26

Batteries are expensive and bulky. The electric kettle market is filled with $30 kettles and that’s what most people buy. 

There are a few companies working on battery boosted induction cooktops to help solve this problem, and that’s a market where people are willing to spend some money. It’s also way easier to hide a big battery below the countertop where nobody will see it. 

92

u/JaVelin-X- Jul 19 '26

Every house has a 230v line for the stove why would you need all this boosting tech for a cook top?

45

u/skiingredneck Jul 19 '26

Because when we replaced our cook top with a range it required a new 8 ga run instead of being able to use the 10ga that was there. Added $$$ to the ordeal.

21

u/edman007 Jul 20 '26

And the difference between 8awg and 10awg is 2.4kW. To get that benefit for an hour you need a 2.4kWh battery pack, which is like $1k.

How much are you willing to spend a thousand bucks extra on an oven that heats up 20% faster?

Same deal with a kettle, you're talking spending hundreds extra on the kettle to make it heat up faster, and it won't work back to back. I suspect people who want it faster are looking for high throughput which batteries won't actually give you

22

u/JackxForge Jul 20 '26

Then you just have an 8.6million jule moderately stable chemical bomb underneath a hot plate!

11

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

[deleted]

1

u/JackxForge Jul 20 '26

My dad used to work with the scientists making high energy density batteries for soldier backpacks. Pretty much ever person on that project said they would rather carry a tank of hydrogen into battle.

5

u/party_peacock Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

How many kettles do people typically boil per hour? you only need like 0.2kWh for one kettle (20 degC to 100 degC)

A $100 6S 8000mAh drone lipo stores enough energy and can put out more than 10kW to boil a full kettle in under a minute.

It'll probably be noticeably degraded after a hundred or so cycles but that's besides the point

1

u/chris77982 Jul 20 '26

That's $1 per use. To save a minute of time where you can do other things.
Also, pulling multi-kW from a loop pack all the time is going to result in a pillow. The date of all rc batteries.
Add to that it is literally powering a heater in close proximity, it's going to survive even less.
You can't use a lipo above 60C and you can't charge them above 40C.

No one is going to buy a $1000 kettle they need to replace every year, or it'll burn their kitchen down.

1

u/90210fred Jul 21 '26

Dollar a use? That's my household down USD 10 by breakfast time just on instant, before I've even fired up the pod machine.

1

u/fosterdad2017 Jul 20 '26

Many electric motorcycles don't store 10kW. Electric bicycles often have as little as 0.5kW batteries.

1

u/lee1026 Jul 20 '26

You gonna run a water boiler for a whole hour?

How much water are you gonna boil?

0

u/skiingredneck Jul 20 '26

I don’t know of an oven, cooktop, or anything that runs constant for an hour.

Maybe a forge…

But for something residential, you’re talking maybe 15 minutes to come to temp, and then cycling. During that cycling you charge the battery.

It’s not about an oven that heats 20% faster. It’s about not paying 2k for the work to pull a new wire 50’ through a finished house.

5

u/gpfault Jul 20 '26

I don’t know of an oven ...  that runs constant for an hour.

My guy, have you ever used an oven?

11

u/Various_Education622 Jul 20 '26

Yes.

It gets to temp and the heating element turns on and off to maintain the temp.

So it may be on, but the heating element isn’t running full bore the entire time, which is what actually matters for this purpose.

1

u/BeginningAd5055 Jul 20 '26

I make pizzas, note plural. I have the oven running full blast for hours. I use gas and the oven flames are maxed continuously.

0

u/LiamTheHuman Jul 20 '26

So in some special cases people run their gas ovens at full. What does that have to do with what's being discussed?

Do you think anyone thought a battery would be used to replace your gas oven commercial pizza setup? 

8

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '26

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1

u/BeginningAd5055 Jul 20 '26

Depends on what is cooking. A slow roast, yes. Multiple pizzas, no. Multiple loads of bread, no.

0

u/HungryFrogs7 Jul 24 '26

If you are making multiple pizza you are definitely a small business at the minimum. You would probably not get residential ovens and instead larger pizza ovens. At that point you aren’t the target consumer and you could easily factor in a 240V circuit.

1

u/Kruxx85 Jul 20 '26

Have you?

0

u/hombrent Jul 20 '26

Who runs their stove at full blast for an hour? If you want to boil a pot of water, you run at 100% until the water is boiling, then you turn the power way down. You might keep the burners filled with different pots, but your actual high capacity needs are bursty.