A Watched Pot Never Boils

I don’t know about you, but I tend to get through a lot of tea and coffee in a day. This means that I have spent an awful lot of my life waiting for kettles to boil, getting distracted, wandering off, remembering that I was making a drink, heading back to the kitchen, and having to re-boil the kettle as the water had cooled (repeat).

Last Christmas my mum gave my wife and I a one cup, boil-on-demand, hot water dispenser. It was very well received. You see the problem with boiling a kettle to make a hot drink, even if you only boil it once, is that you always have to heat more water than you are going to use. This is a horribly inefficient way to do things. The one cup dispenser solves this problem. You still have to wait, but you never heat more water than you need.

A couple of months after receiving this gift I joined the team at sinks-taps.com. On my first day I was shown around the building, introduced to my new colleagues, informed of where all of the emergency exits were located, and shown the kitchen. It was in the kitchen that I first encountered an instant hot water dispenser. It was an InSinkErator HC-1100. This little beauty could provide an instant flow of filtered water, heated to 98°C at a rate of up to 100 cups an hour. Not a kettle in sight, no waiting, no waste. In my mind, this was the next best thing to having a bottomless cup of tea/coffee.

Considering the fact that the United Kingdom consumes more tea per capita than any other country in the world, the amount of time and energy that could be saved by replacing a significant proportion of the country’s kettles with instant hot water dispensers would be immense. Add to this the fact that these taps can not only be used to make drinks - they can also be used in cooking, cleaning, literally everything that you would use a regular kettle for - and you realise the potential time and energy saving is even greater.

New models and designs are being brought out all of the time, including Franke’s new Minerva 3-in-1 Kettle Tap which was announced this year. It’s not hard to imagine a day when none of us have to participate in that most tedious of tasks: waiting for the kettle to boil.

Right, all this talk of hot drinks has made me thirsty. I’m off to make a cuppa. It won’t take long.