I think its important to pick your battles when trying to save energy/money. Focusing on vampire devices can be foolish when you can achieve much more substantial impacts through simple behavioural changes.
It can feel satisfying to go around turning off plug sockets when they’re not in use, but eating less meat, using public transport now and then, driving a little slower on the motorways, can all have impacts of a whole’nother magnitude.
You could probably test this yourself quite easily with just one smart plug that monitors power consumption.
Plug it in and leave it as you would do normally, see what it uses. Then set a routine that turns it off at a certain time and back on at a certain time and see what the difference is. Then you can work out if it’s worth buying more plugs/cost saving per year etc etc.
I’m not resetting my microwave clock daily for 92p a year
Kettles are close to 100% efficient, so it’s going to be hard to get better than that for energy use… the much lower price of gas though might swing it for using that even though you’re wasting a bunch of the heat.
I bet it is… the only way kettles lose energy is by insufficient insulation, and for the time it takes to boil and pour even that isn’t going to be that significant.
Overfilling of course is just throwing money away… that excess heat from the standing water just heats the room around it and ultimately escapes.
Anarchist
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53
Depends how the kettle is used, maybe. For a kettle in more or less constant use, filling it might result in an energy saving by only boiling warm/ hot water.
I use the induction hob, it’s faster and my guess would be it’s more efficient because if you boil it in the kettle, you have to transfer it and it loses heat, and the pan needs warming up.
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Anarchist
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55
I don’t have an induction job, but I warm the pan up with half a pint of water while the kettle is boiling.