Electric Kettle or Gas Saucepan Cheapest Use?

[ARW]

So what would you use to clean a saucepan that has been used to boil clean water?

[ARW]

Invite them round round for a brew.

[polygonum]

Have a look here:

It does not answer your question - but it does indicate a possible direction to take in achieving maximum efficiency of heat transfer from burnt gas to water.

Note that the page mentions various other products which have similar ideas behind them and might be more suited to your requirements.

It also gives rise to the possibility of using lots of other fuels - subject to availability and price.

[Theo Markettos]

Boiling water, obviously. You want to make sure it's sterile after being full of all that clean water.

Theo

[Toby]

When you have the heating on, then it will almost certainly cheaper to use the gas, as any waste heat will contribute to the home heating, so there won't really be any "loss" from either method assuming you don't put the extractor fan on for the pan and not the kettle...

[polygonum]

Fundamental problem. Use of energy in absolute terms (e.g. how many joules are needed) and cost, while bearing some relation in general, might not follow each other in the expected way in your specific case.

That is, it might be cheaper to use more energy. Or not. Or it depends on where the energy is measured.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

But why would you use the electric meter? Using the gas one would be even more tricky - unless you boiled many gallons of water and worked it out from that. So it would be easier to find out how much the hob uses from its spec.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Because in many areas it would no longer be sparkling clean. Would you hang up a pot which looked dirty?

I suppose you could use a kettle designed for a gas ring.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You've never boiled a saucepan of water in a hard water area?

[John Rumm]

Well measuring the electric kettle energy use should be easy enough with a clamp meter and a DVM. You should be able to time the boil time for the litre and come up with a pretty close overall energy use.

For the gas I would start from the baseline of the smallest rings normally being of a maximum heat output of around 1kW, and the larger ones being perhaps 1.8kW.

Boil the gas kettle with the ring full on, and multiply by the power to get the total energy. At that point it should be fairly evident how close the race is, before needing to look at maximising the efficiency of heat transfer to the water from the flame etc.

[charles]

How many kettle leads come with the live and neutral separated for using a clamp on meter?

[Apellation Controlee]

So how about an induction hob?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Why not simply look at the bottom of it and see how many watts it uses? Far more accurate than a clamp meter.

[PeterC]

Not necessarily. At about 242V on load, my current (sorry) kettle shows about 2940W (so near enough for most purposes) but the last one was, IIRC, about 28**W, where ** is mid-tens somewhere, so could be ~5% inaccurate.

[The Other Mike]

You mean just like looking at the front panel of a bit of plastic cased 80's hi-fi from Dixons?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

And what's the accuracy of the clamp meter? Commonly +/- 2%.

[Chris J Dixon]

And your task now is to work out the how long it would take to pay back buying a 1 kW kettle, so that it is even cheaper for more of the year, provided you can wait a little longer.

Chris

[Adam Funk]

To get kWh, don't you need a "calorific value" (IIRC) that varies a little from one gas bill to the next?

[Adam Funk]

& it will EXPLODE IN YOUR FACE when you add the teabag. So the interweb says, anyway.

[John Rumm]

For an exact conversion, yes.