Steam bubbles stir up the water nicely, and transfer heat to it very well. They don't cause loss of efficiency. They might if you put 100kW through the element, and steam bubbling threw half the water out.
That's the approach used in Japan, where mains power is limited to about 1kW. Less peak demand but it adds standing losses.
that doesn't mean efficiency is the better choice, it might or might not be.
not to any noticeable extent. Adding insulation has trivial gain because it's mostly not heating up.
Of course it would cost money, but I expect that in the main people would only buy them when they demonstrated their savings to exceed their cost. So it doesn't cost the nation a bean.
today's lamps are much more reliable than filaments
I'd say how is the big question, not the detail. It determines whether it's worth doing.
Predicting electronic reliability is all but impossible. As engineers we tr y, but a huge swathe of goods designed to be high reliability die because o ne little detail got overlooked. It happens all the time. Even mil spec stu ff sometimes turns out to be poor on reliability.
That raises the question of how such mandation would work in practice.
A set procedure would be established to assess the longevity of what is an ever moving target of technology. All sellers would be required at consi derable expense to go through this long and ever lengthening assessment pro cess, which would produce bullsht results. The costs would all be passed on to the consumer, at which point some notice it's yet another racket.
Long detailed lists of mandatory specs are drawn up, with ever more adde d. These preclude more and more technological and methodological developmen ts, resulting in worse products compared to the free market.
The whole thing costs and costs. In various ways we pay for it all.
Consumption due to lighting is going to be dropping drastically anyway. Visiting the BiL today they are close to having all LED lights. They even have some of these LED "filament" lamps, clear glass, which give light just like the old tungstens. Only clue is this yellow mould on the filament.
So, there *is* a maximum efficiency rate then and have you ever opened the lid of a 3kW kettle just as it was coming to the boil to see 'bubbling nearly throwing the water out ...'?
Ok
Ok. I was just reading the bumf on an insulated kettle and it suggested the once boiling water was still at 80 DegC after two hours. Surely the energy required to re-boil the kettle from 80 to 100 DegC some two hours after last boiling the kettle has got to be much less than taking that same water from 20 to 100 DegC as you would after two hours with a conventional kettle? 75% less?
With that little loss it must mitigate the losses whilst heating and so better justify a lower (slower) rating kettle? Win Win?
Yes, what I said then (but probably *not* actually 'as high a power as possible' as there may be other constraints, like instantly vaporising all the water!) ;-)
You probably meant 'the maximum power you can draw from a domestic plug socket'.
But en-masse, lower power kettles will still boil water but create less of a peak load on the grid. It's (the potential restrictions) are probably supposed to be a compromise between getting your cuppa in a reasonable time whilst minimising peak loads on the grid.
Now, once everyone is watching time-shifted TV, maybe such 'peak loads' won't be an issue? ;-)
It also adds standing losses and costs more. If they can be made cheaply I'd agree it's a win, but haven't seen them yet at reasonable prices. One day hopefully.
Seriously it might be an option to uprate mains plugs for short duration use only, like they do in US. Do that and an intelligent kettle with power control becomes a lot more attractive, as it would boil faster most of the time. 16A is what, 3.8kW.
I don't know what it is about charity shops. When my mother-in-law died, we offered a number of items to a variety of charities - including a TV that was less than 6 months old and a three-piece suite that although 10 years old was virtually unused, looked brand new and still had the fire rating tags attached.
Not one of them was willing to come and look. Three were less than 200 yards from the house, as she lived in a cul-de-sac directly behind the high-street shops - one was even on the corner at the end of her road!
Except that the biggest peak for kettles is when the adverts come on during coverage of some big event or a "spectacular" in a soap, and people want to get their tea made fast enough that they can be sat down again by the end of the adverts.
When I needed to install an extractor fan in our bathroom, I knew full well that a modern, heat-recovery version might well be worth installing in the long run - however, I could not justify, nor afford at that time, the hundreds of pounds one costs and ended up fitting a £25 fan bought on Ebay.
Electric cars are still expensive, still useless for anyone that ever needs to make more than local journeys, still useless for anyone without a driveway to charge on and will likely have a pretty short life - who wants to pay thousands for a new battery on a six year old vehicle or hundreds per month to rent a battery for a car of that age?
Now that is something that I would definitely do. Adding internal insulation is pretty cheap. The stupid thing is that you are supposed to involve building control and get them to sign it off! That means that many houses will not have any insulation added. An inch of insulation will not meet the regulations despite making a big difference, but in a box room or any other small room, losing more may make the room unuseable - many only just fit a bed or standard sized bath as it is.
Yes, we have one of those. Bosch Styline. The retail prices vary wildly, so people should shop around. Cheapest at the moment seems to be about 40 quid, from Argos and John Lewis at least. And it has a proper metal mesh spout filter, not a silly plastic one that disintegrates at first touch!
Knowing two people who volunteer in one of them its mostly just the usual thing that they prefer that people show up with the stuff they want to give them and only show up with stuff that they can use, in other words are happy to take the stuff the don?t want to the dump too.
It's fairly universal for those trying to sell things etc to complain about rules and regs. Regardless of where they come from. And many complain about EU ones simply because they are EU. Regardless of merit.
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