As our tank is a long way from our kitchen sink I keep thinking about a boiling water tap like the Quooker but the moment I look at the price I lose interest.
There are cheaper alternatives however and this one has caught my eye.
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Seems to be essentially the same as the Quooker insofar as it’s an unvented heat store (others, like the Quettle seem to be vented). The Quooker does maintain water at just above boiling which I don’t think the Fohen tap does. Dunno whether this has any practical implications.
Anyone have any experience of these Quooker lookalikes?
Isn't the purpose of a boiling water tap to make drinks like tea whereas a hot water tap provides hot water for washing things?
Don't know if anybody else here worked in Lyons in the school holidays but it seems to me the hot water tap is what we used to call "the steam" in Lyons.
Well yes but I’m pretty sure that one can mix boiling water and cold water in a sink. It may be possible to run cold and boiling simultaneously (although I doubt there will be any mixing going on).
It’s certainly not ideal for washing up but when you’ve looked at the price of a Quooker with their “Combi” tank, you’re looking at over £1,500.
In message snipped-for-privacy@news.individual. net>, Tim+ snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.youkay> writes
No:-)
I do have 4 years of Quooker experience which may be of interest.
Lesson 1. You can't have a plastic sink (Corrion) fed from a boiling water outlet.
Lesson 2. Quooker have a habit of upgrading/changing the versions of their hot supply making d-i-y maintenance tortuous.
Lesson 3. Stuff wears, even with only 2 elderly users. (tap body)
Lesson 4. A simple de-scale is expensified as the sealant washer kit is supplied with the Allen key and spanner already found in most handy man tool kits.
Otherwise it is a valuable time saver and helps de-clutter the sink area.
The temperature they quote is ideal for coffee, which, unlike tea, should not be made with boiling water. However, even at that price, I will stick with using a kettle.
A friend of mine has a Quooker but it suffered a solenoid failure out of warranty. It was down to poor installation causing water to leak onto the solenoid.
Solenoids on their own turned out to be unobtainium which meant an expensive complete swap out of the element etc.
Other than that, she loves it. ;-)
I do wonder about availability of tap spares for the fohen tap.
I'd be interested in a lesson 5: saving electricity.
Their own FAQs suggest within 3p and 9p a day, to produce 3 litres of water. They don't say why it should vary. A kettle would boil that same water for 7p. Quite how a water store is potentially better than 100% efficient I don't know.
Thanks for the link. What I kinda suspected regarding costs but I’ve been swayed by the convenience factor (and clearing a bit of valuable counter space).
I’ve gone for the fohen tap. If it turns out to be crap I’ll let you all know.
Problem is that it is NOT equivalent to a Quooker, and it WON'T do what you're setting out to achieve.
It will be ok for making tea and coffee, but little use for anything else. The blurb says that the hot and cold taps use your *existing* supplies - so the hot will still be coming from a long way away.
The Quooker combi, on the other hand, feeds the hot tap with water from the boiling water tank mixed with cold to provide an appropriate temperature. Mine has a separate boiling water tap - for which spares are readily available albeit at an inflated price. Mine also has a capacity of 7 litres which is much more useful for filling a large washing-up bowl than the Fohen's 2.4 litre tank.
We've had the Quooker for at least 10 years and have been very pleased with it. It cost just under £1000 at the time, and I did a DIY installation. I'm not sure of the economics - the cost of heating the water with electricity rather than gas but then having to waste a lot of hot metered water getting it to the tap. Either way, it's well worth it for the convenience.
The FAQs say the tap's tank takes water from the cold water supply:
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(How do boiling taps work?)
It looks as though you can keep your existing hot water supply and use it and/or the boiling water tap as required - I think that's a characteristic of all of these things?
Same as the Fohen, although only 98C.
I think this thread has highlighted that economic cost is not a major consideration for people thinking about using boiling water taps. That said, it'd be well worth asking about spares at the time of buying.
Yes, that's quite small - but enough I'd have thought for one sink of washing up.
The larger the tank, the more it'll cost to run, all other things equal. That's a limitation of the link I gave - it's not clear which models are tested (although it does list assumed tank sizes - maybe it can be deduced).
There's a breakdown in the link I gave upthread. The big variation in running costs quite surprised me - I can only think it's down to tank capacity and the insulation of the tank.
A decent rule of thumb is electricity costs 4 times as much as a modern combi boiler to provide hot water for cleaning and washing.
Boiling water taps work out about the same, running costs wise, as a kettle for most uses (about 10l of boiling water per day).
Indeed - my combi takes a full minute to get hot water to the bath.
I could add the capital outlay, maintenance and repair, environmental cost and waste of energy to the running costs to achieve that convenience. But I won't :-)
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