this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Europeans when they discover that no, most Americans really do not own a kettle rule.
Hmmm. Most of the Americans I know have electric kettles now. It's probably my most used kitchen gadget. Great for making tea or coffee, or boiling water for oatmeal. I just used it tonight to get some warm water to soak my lizard (not a euphemism) and to thaw out a frozen mouse for a snake. Honestly it gets used probably 5 or 6 times a day most days.
Was... Was that an euphemism?
Is that weird? I would assume snakes wouldn’t want to eat a frozen mouse.
Not the poster you're responding to by my spouse has snakes and uses our kettle to boil water to thaw out their mice
They're getting more common. I personally used a stovetop kettle as recently as six years ago. But electric kettles are a world of difference.
Minor problem for me is currently living in a very old house that we don't own and using a proper electric kettle will pop a breaker. I recently bought a travel kettle that uses like 1/5 the wattage instead
let alone an electric kettle
I can’t imagine life without an electric kettle…
I don't know what happened. We used to be really into tea. Blame the Townshend Acts I guess?
We dumped that tea into the Boston Harbor because we didn't want that crap.
No we did, it was good tea. That's what made the message clear, the value being sacrificed. The popular American predilection for tea up until after the Townshend Acts was well documented by de Tocqueville. It was only after that drinking tea was considered "unpatriotic". Before then we would even eat boiled tea leaves with butter as a side dish. We were mad about the stuff, but as a colony we were only allowed to buy British tea. It was a whole thing.
Anyway I've had an electric kettle for ages. It's more common in Asian-American households perhaps. We didn't fit in that well in the states, so we went back to the UK. Now I only buy British tea again. Full circle.
ngl there's a tea from Cornwall that is my absolute favorite black tea now
They do things right out in Cornwall. We were vacationing at lands end when storm Henk made landfall, it was memorable to say the least.
we asian muricans use those kettles for instant ramen lol
Tea, instant ramen, oatmeal, eggs, electric kettles are awesome and really convenient.
Cultural taste can change over time for various reasons. Tea has been inherently traditional to many countries, not as much to others.
we are shifting to boiling taps too now
So, I'm Greek and I also have never used a kettle. In fact, you won't find one in most households. But all of us have a briki. It's like a mini pot!
We use it to boil water/make cofee/tea/boil 1-2 eggs etc
I don't get it either, I've always made tea with a small pot. It is just something to heat up water. It has a lid. The only time I started seeing a lot of kettles around was when pour over / V60 / Chemex became fashionable and every place started selling gooseneck kettles.
Wait, do Americans not own kettles?
That’s like one of the first things I bought when I moved out.
In my country (and most of northern Europe I presume), induction stoves are becoming very common. I tossed my electric kettle 7 years ago when I got induction.
It's faster than a kettle in most of my pots.
their shitty electrical grid means kettles take like double the time to boil.
I’ve actually timed my kettle. 15 ounces of water(I have larger mugs than ‘normal’) takes 2 minutes and 34 seconds to be a full rolling boil. I’m really not that concerned.
Great video on this from technology connections. tl;dr it takes more time, but not, like, that much more. We mostly just don't have a huge tea-drinking culture here.
My family (American) did drink a lot of tea. Surprise surprise, we had a kettle. I did not die of old age from the cumulative weight of all that waiting.
Not yet. Just you wait.
chronic exposure to time dramatically increases your chances of getting terminally old.
It's still just a few minutes. Don't heat up more water than you are going to use.
So why does Japan at 100V have electric kettles everywhere? It's a cultural reason not the electrical grid.
good point! i don't know much about their grid, only that it's 50Hz in the west and 60Hz in the east.
I've never heard of anywhere in US using 50Hz and I've lived on the West Coast my whole life.
I love that you've come into a discussion about Japan's electrical grid and still assumed that the conversation is about America.
I mean, the conversation started about America's electric grid. It was ambiguous from context.
No it really wasn't. "I don't know much about their grid" means the next "it" in the comment is referring to "their grid". No ambiguity to be had, friend.
that may be because we were talking about japan!
Not that East and West, the East and West.
Pretty much every person I know in Canada has an electric kettle and every single office I've worked in has one, my kitchen has 15a outlets which is still 1800W. I have a simple gooseneck kettle that I usw mainly for coffee, it's only 1kW and holds around 750ml, it's not blisteringly fast but it's boiled before I've ground my coffee.
The whole "120v is holding us back from having kettles" is way overblown (technology connections has a video on electric kettles).
Our grid uses the same voltages as Europe. Our houses even generally receive 240V from the line. It's just that we went with 120V for most appliances and electronics for some reason.
I'd also argue a lot of Americans technically do have electric kettles, and they just don't realize it because they're advertised as coffee makers. It's not ideal, but you can definitely use a drip coffee machine to boil water, and it'll still be faster than a stove.
Unfortunately for every tea drinker in an American hotel, most coffee makers (at least the drip kind) will make any water boiled inside taste like coffee, unless they've been used exclusively for plain boiled water. Maybe a combo tea/coffee drinker wouldn't mind, but I've always found it intolerable.
But it's a good point about the grid - we have plenty of appliances for coffee that are principally glorified water boilers, and there's no evidence that our appliance voltage has hampered their popularity at all.
it really doesn't. european houses generally receive 400V from the line, split into 3 220V phases. you guys get two 120V phases that are fully phase-shifted, rather than 120° offset, and you bridge two phases to get 240 for heavy appliances.
It's mostly for commercial installations, but you can get 3-phase 480V here if you want it.
I don't think this has much to do with the grid, though. It's more that we started with 120V appliances, so that's what we built our homes to support.
not true, that's a myth
I own one because I'm a coffee snob and enjoy pourovers. Before I went down that whole road, no. And neither did anyone I knew well enough to dig through their kitchen
Tea isn't that popular here although I'd argue in recent years it has been gaining on what it once was. I think where other countries kettles are the norm, here "coffee makers" are the norm.
The majority of the more "popular" form of tea we'd have here is probably considered an abomination onto nuggin elsewhere: sweet tea. (Iced tea with about 628648lbs of sugar in it.)
I think this is the largest reason right here. People are naturally going to reserve their limited counter space for the stuff they use daily. For Americans, that's more likely to be some kind of coffee maker than an electric kettle.
Growing up where I did, I knew a lot of families that regularly made iced tea. But they usually made a gallon at a time, once or twice a week, and still drank coffee every day - so they had counter top coffee makers, and stovetop kettles that could be stored away the rest of the week.
I had a dedicated saucepan to make iced tea to ensure my tea only tasted like tea.
I guess I’m surprised, I’m in Canada so expected we’d be very similar.
But you also have garbage disposals and I’ve never seen one here.
Are we talking about electric kettles or kettles in general?