Which is more efficient for heating water – a kettle or a microwave?
Suppose you are going to make pasta, and you want to heat the water to boiling – do you put cold water in the microwave and zap it, or do you boil the water in the kettle and tip it onto the pasta.
Well, it’s pretty easy to work out – you look at the power rating of the appliances, and the heating time should be inversely proportional – so a 1000W device should heat water twice as qyuickly as a 500W device.
So I did the experiment- the same amount of water in both a microwave and kettle – which heats up quicker (taking into account the power rating.
And the winner is…..the kettle.
Why is it so? There are all sorts of factors involved, but I think the reason is very simple – when a kettle heats water, all the energy that is being put into it goes into the water.
But the microwave just blasts the entire cavity of the oven, and the only energy that goes into heating are the waves that happen to collide with the water.
In other words, a lot of the microwaves simply miss the water…..
So back to the kettle.