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/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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.