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You go to the kettle, you fill it up and you have your cuppa - right? Wrong! You not only have your cuppa but you also boil, on average, twice the amount of water you need, which means twice as much time and twice as much energy. And, with a 3kW kettle, that's the same as 50 lightbulbs burning bright.
OK, so here's an idea. Why not get hold of the new Eco-kettle instead? It's a bit different from your average kettle. Measuring water in your average kettle is tricky - even with the measuring windows on many household kettles. You know what it's like: the window gets clouded, the measuring thingy breaks and you're working by guesswork again.
The Eco-kettle, by comparison, is simple, clean and reliable. The internal reservoir holds 1.5 litres of water ready for use, while the measuring button allows any quantity from a single cupful to the full whack to be released into a separate chamber for boiling. Which means exactly the right amount of water every time you boil - and no more waste.
As with all energy-conserving ideas, it's smart and it's simple and has great consequences. Typical savings are 31 per cent of energy used. And, if we start putting our own house in order, who's to say the wider community won't follow?
Now for some stats. The DETR have worked out that the UK alone drinks a staggering 229 million cups of tea and coffee every day. That's enough to fill 22 Olympic-size swimming pools or a small lake! It works out at an amazing 9.5 million cups every hour, 159,027 cups every minute and 2,650 cups every second.
"Every time we boil a kettle, we use more water than we need," a spokesperson said. "We also waste valuable energy and contribute to climate change. On average, we could all save 90 seconds each time we boil a kettle by putting in only the amount of water we need. Such a simple action would also cut household electricity bills. Overfilling each time we boil wastes enough energy in a week to light our house for a day or run a TV set for 26 hours." The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) also say: "If everyone boiled only the water they needed to make a cup of tea instead of 'filling' the kettle every time, we could save enough electricity to run practically all the street lighting in the UK"
The Eco Kettle is available at www.insightecostore.com for £39.95 + p&p.
copyright The Insight
2005
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