this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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Surly the batteries will end up costing way more than the outlet installation plus you'd be stuck with yet another proprietary battery that will hard/impossible to replace yourself. No thanks.
My immediate thought about that item was almost the reverse: They should do it for electric kettles in the US! Imagine having half a gallon of boiling water in like 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes or whatever it is now (and then the kettle would charge for a few hours, but still be able to heat at the normal wall outlet rate in the meantime)
Assuming regular cold tap water as starting point (that's ~10°C for me) you'd need a power output of something like 50kW to heat a gallon (3.8L) of water to boiling in 30sec, assuming a 98% efficiency.
Ah, I was just making up numbers, but since those car jump start battery packs claim to have hundreds of amps (I saw one with 1,000 in a quick search) at 12V, and this will be like a bunch of those, if those numbers are real it should be totally feasible for it to dump the energy fast enough.
Since you brought it up, I might as well check the other numbers.
Doing the 30 seconds multiplication for the half gallon I mentioned (my kettle only holds 1.7 l = .37 gal anyway), that's 208.3 Wh, which for a typical lithium 3.6V nominal voltage would be 58Ah, a lot of battery, but not unrealistic - I'm holding a power tool battery (Stihl AK30) which is 180 Wh (50 Ah)
Over the course of those 30 seconds it could also pull 12.5 Wh from the wall to slightly reduce the needed battery size.
You'd be surprised at how much it could cost to run a new 240v circuit, especially if your house doesn't have a crawl space or an easily accessible attic.
(I'm mostly talking about the US here. this probably doesn't apply to Europe an other places)
It's like every day I'm learning about new thing that just works in Europe but is completely broken in US. Are they choosing wrong solutions on purpose?
Sometimes it feels like that ;) I'm sure there are cases where it's the other way around
Don't all electric ranges already run on 240V? Why would you need to run a new circuit? I mean I've seen houses where the owner chose to install a gas range but the electric line was already in place. I've only ever seen one apartment that had gas but no electric service in the kitchen, so I guess I'm not seeing the problem?
If you have a gas range and wanted to switch, and all your other outlets in the kitchen are 110V, you'd need a new circuit (yes, we're talking about the USA here, if you're from somewhere else I understand your confusion).
No, I'm in the US, I just have seen almost no houses that didn't already have a 240V three-prong outlet installed for an oven. The places I have lived (except for that first apartment) didn't even have a gas line available to the kitchen. Maybe this is just an issue with much older homes along the East coast?
If your house, like mine, was all set up for a gas range and a gas oven, why would it have a 240v outlet (and yes, the house was built in the 50s, but it's on the west coast). But of course, houses that are all wired for electric ranges, maybe not even have a gas line at all, like some apartment I lived in the past, will already have a 240v outlet.
Yeah this is a bad idea. Like all other appliances, it’s easier to simply subsidize energy improvement projects such as running electrical to the kitchen and panel upgrades.