DailyDirt: Boiling Water More Efficiently

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Boiling water might sound like a common and easy thing to do, but precisely because it's such a ubiquitous activity, if we can make it more efficient, we can save a sizable amount of energy. Maybe you've tried not watching a kettle to see if it boils faster, but far more serious efforts are making progress on more efficient boiling. Cookware isn't the only application that could benefit from more efficient thermal transfer. Check out these examples of making hot water using less energy. After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: boiling, cookware, energy, flare pan, heat transfer, nanorods, nanotech, nanotechnology, phase change, water


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 9 Jun 2015 @ 6:24pm

    flare pan

    Those pans are only more efficient when using gas stoves, I'd imagine. The flares wouldn't do anything for an induction stove, and I have no idea if an electric heating element would do anything with those flares.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    identicon
    Your Pirate Reportor, 9 Jun 2015 @ 7:28pm

    Good news, everyone! Pirate Mike posting again at Suprbay!

    https://pirates-forum.org/Forum-Economics-Law-Politics

    Let's look at the stats, Biff, and see what we can learn.

    Pirate Mike has made roughly 710 posts of Techdirt articles at SuprBay over roughly ten months; let's say average 70 posts a month. Only 7 posts by today June 9th looks FAR less than previous rate...

    From one post time (apparently CST), if done manually, he was up at 5:38 AM (in New York) or 2:38 AM (in Frisco). -- Seems to indicate his posts aren't automated, else why pick such odd hour / minute?

    Currently, the three posts made today (latest says 5 hours ago) have a total of 56 views. FIFTY SIX.

    1 reply thus far. ONE.

    So why does Pirate Mike keep posting there for at least TEN months now? Is he desperate for readers? If he spent even 3 minutes to get 56 readers (none new, I bet!), that's ridiculous waste of time.

    Of course, by this and future hootage, I hope to keep Mulish Mike from stopping! But either way, I get the hoots!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 9 Jun 2015 @ 7:33pm

    Or Just Lower The Pressure

    Water boils at a lower temperature when the atmospheric pressure is lower.

    Oh, you want hot boiling water?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 9 Jun 2015 @ 8:40pm

    Boiling water at room temperature

    I've actually seen water boiling at room temperature.

    When the vapor pressure of the water exceeds that of the atmosphere, it boils. Normally, at mean sea level, that happens at 212.

    A bell jar, a vacuum pump, and you get boiling water at room temperature.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. icon
    Nigel (profile), 9 Jun 2015 @ 10:18pm

    Re: Good news, everyone! Pirate Mike posting again at Suprbay!

    take your meds dimwit

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. icon
    Mason Wheeler (profile), 10 Jun 2015 @ 6:59am

    Re: Boiling water at room temperature

    Yeah, it's a really weird sensation to stick your hand in a pot of (safe) boiling water. ;)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    Rekrul, 10 Jun 2015 @ 7:49am

    They say that warm water freezes faster than cold water, so obviously the solution to making water boil faster is to start with extremely cold water! :)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    Andrew D. Todd, 10 Jun 2015 @ 7:54am

    The Real Issue of Cooking is Safety.

    About a year ago, we had a fire in my apartment building. A group of young men attempted to grill food by placing a number of layers of aluminum foil on top of the electric stove-top burners. The burner's heating element might have been at 1300-1400 deg. F, and the melting point of aluminum is only 1100-1200 deg. F, so that was bound to end badly. Young men in groups, eg. students or GI's, tend to cook rather like children, and they are prone to the same kinds of cooking misadventures. Children sometimes give themselves serious burns, climbing up on stoves to reach the controls. Women, even very young women, are not prone to that kind of mistake, but that reflects serious and supervised kitchen training, starting at the age of seven or so. I recall that at the age of twelve or so, my kid sister was doing omelettes and chicken cordon bleu.

    I have reflected on the safety issues of the stove-top burner, and I have come to the conclusion that it is time to abolish the stove-top burner. Cooking apparatus needs to be designed with integral heating elements, which can be properly insulated, both in the electrical and the thermal senses of the word. There is no need to get the food hotter than five hundred degrees or so. There is room for discussion about how energy is to be delivered to the cooking utensils. Electricity and magnetic flux are good candidates, as they can be automatically shut off in a mili-second by a suitable safety device. To drive heat across an imperfect contact between two pieces of metal-- the present system-- requires excessive temperatures.

    I made some rough-and-ready thermodynamic calculations for my microwave oven, and came to the conclusion that it is about ten percent efficient when cooking small quantities of stuff, eg. making a cup of instant coffee. Conventional domestic water heaters are very efficient, say 95%+, but they tend to accumulate gunk, and their water is not reliably pure enough for drinking. The problem about a Nanostructure surface is, how do you clean it? A Mr. Coffee-type coffeemaker works on the principle of an immersion coil, with suitable safety interlocks, and is highly efficient.

    There are specialized little microwave ovens, design for laboratory use, capable of being plugged into pipelines, and heating a fluid as it passes through. In the case I read about, circa 1980, one of these little ovens was being used to put small quantities of ceramic materials, mixed with a carrier gas, into a vacuum-incandescent state, so that their infrared spectra could be measured. Of course, nowadays, a laser in a vacuum chamber would be a better solution.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    Andrew D. Todd, 10 Jun 2015 @ 7:58am

    Carnot's Law

    The dominant limitation on power plant efficiency is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, otherwise known as Carnot's Law, that is:

    Theoretical Maximum Efficiency = (Absolute_Temp_Hot_End - Absolute_Temp_Cold_End ) / Absolute_Temp_Hot_End

    Bearing in mind that Absolute Zero is -459 F, it is practically rather difficult to find a place to drain heat at less than 500-550 deg Abs. For an engine to be really efficient, its hot end has to be hot enough to melt steel, let alone copper. If you burn fuel in oxygen,you can get it to burn at 5000-6000 deg. F. That is hot enough that the result is a plasma. You can contain a plasma in a magnetic field, and extract most of its energy electromagnetically in the course of cooling the plasma to about two thousand degrees, at which point it ceases to be a plasma, and is fed into an ordinary steam plant. This is called a Magneto-Hydro-Dynamic process (MHD). A combined MHD-steam cycle can be something like 60% efficient. The main losses, of course, come from the super-hot plasma throwing off visible light and infrared radiation faster than the MHD coil can extract electro-mechanical energy.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    Socrates, 10 Jun 2015 @ 12:17pm

    No more thermodynamic laws

    Oh no, why did the thermodynamic laws get to be repealed in my time!
    Scientists scatter confused around in the library like small brownian particles.

    May we still appeal the repeal of the laws,
    or is this the eternal punishment from a loving god!

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.