While you have running hot and cold water in your kitchen, what you probably don’t have is a tap that you can twist for a cup of boiling hot water anytime you choose to make a cup of tea, coffee or Ramen noodles. Somehow, for these aims, people have always been expected to draw water in a kettle and heat it.
If this shortcoming in kitchen design has always seemed outmoded and inconvenient to you, things have finally begun to change. Manufacturers of sanitary fittings from Grohe to InSinkErator have designed clever new kitchen tap assemblies that offer water at three temperatures — regular, hot and boiling. To supply instant boiling water, these taps use an under-sink water heating tank that keeps a couple of liters of water on the boil at all times. It is a new product category, and it’s called the boiling water tap.
How useful is a boiling water tap?
It can get old waiting for a kettle to come to a boil several times a day. In most homes, the need to wait means that family members don’t even think of a cup of tea or coffee whenever they want it. It seems too hard. They feel obliged, instead, to drink it when everyone else wants one. A boiling water tap can change all of this.
It ends up being not about convenience, then, but about actually getting what you want. In homes with boiling water taps, people simply get more tea or coffee than in homes without such an amenity. When you also have a quiet coffee grinder that won’t bother anyone when you want to get some fresh ground coffee, you’ll find that life is just more convenient. People with boiling water taps even find themselves doing things that they never did before — such as use recipes where blanching is called for.
Is it more efficient?
Boiling water taps don’t come cheap. High-powered under-sink water heaters and well-designed safety mechanisms that prevent accidental scalding cost money. The fact that these are a niche product, however, means that economies of scale haven’t yet been achieved. Buying one of these units can easily set you back £1,000 with installation. For outlay of the size, it would make one feel better to know that there were cost-efficiencies involved.
Manufacturers of boiling water tap assemblies such as Qooker publish encouraging running costs. Boiling water from a tap made by this company costs no more than a penny a liter of boiling water dispensed. Since figures for kettle-boiled water are closer to 2.5p a liter, it’s easy to see that boiling water taps easily achieve 60% cost savings.
There is another way to look at these cost reckonings. To supply hot water on demand, the heater under the sink needs to kick in frequently, and work all day and all night. If the average household uses three liters of boiling water a day in the kitchen, it would amount to about 6p a day. This would bring down the cost savings achieved, somewhat.
Savings are possible. It’s important to realize, however, that it would take a very long time to make back the hundreds of pounds invested.
You should do it for the environment
Without question, boiling water taps do save electricity. They also save a couple of hundred liters of water each year. This is because with regular hot water taps, you always need to run the water for a while before hot water comes out. A boiling water tap is simply more environmentally responsible.
Aimee Russell writes about food, drink and healthy living. She is a newlywed who works at an indie coffee roasters (yes, she’s slightly addicted to coffee!) and enjoys yoga and gardening in her spare time.
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