Quookers – boiling water on tap – can be an energy bomb

A Quooker will make your electricity bill grow
‘If you replace your electric kettle with a Quooker, your total energy bill will undoubtedly rise. Even though the Quooker gives you the advantage of drawing the actual amount of boiling water that you need, an electric kettle will nonetheless be more energy efficient. With an electric kettle you will have to waste around 2½ litres per day before it pays to invest in a Quooker,’ says Anders Hjorth Jensen, Project Manager at the Trust, who continues:

‘One reason for this is that the Quooker has a standby consumption of 11.2 watts, which an electric kettle does not have. This means that consumers still have unnecessary standby consumption costing around EUR 27 per year.’

Boiling water on tap
A Quookers is a tap-like device that supplies boiling water kept at continual boiling temperature in a water tank. This means that a user can always draw boiling water without having to wait for the water to boil as you have to do with an electric kettle.

Quooker as hot water tap
Quookers are also available in a tap tank combo version that you connect to a mixer tap. This mixes the boiling water with the cold water feed, thereby replacing the ordinary hot water from the tap. On this basis electricity, rather than gas or oil for example, is used to produce hot water. This is bad for both your energy consumption and your financial outlay.

Electricity is without doubt the most polluting form of heating in Denmark, releasing 3-4 times more CO2 than district heating, and costing twice as much or more.

Launched as extremely energy saving
Quooker’s advertising on its website claims that ‘the Quooker Combo is extremely energy saving’ and that the savings achieved by a Quooker compared with an electric kettle are ‘minimum 50%’.

But this is clearly contradicted by the recently published results from the Danish Technological Institute.

Quookers encourage us to use more boiling water
‘In particular, if you choose a combo version connected to your mixer tap, your electricity consumption goes wild. Because in this situation, you are replacing the ordinary hot water, which is heated by district heating for example, with water produced by the Quooker which is heated by electricity,’ says Anders Hjort Jensen.

‘Consumers will obviously use the boiling water from the Quooker for a whole host of purposes which they would otherwise not have used boiling water for, and where there actually is no need: To shrivel tomatoes, make something clean, rinse dirty tableware, etc. This increases consumption even more with obvious consequences for your energy consumption, purse and the environment.’

‘If you really want to reduce your electricity consumption, then you should think carefully before investing in a Quooker,’ he concludes.

Quick & Hot is energy neutral
The Quick & Hot equivalent produced by Tefal actually stores the water cold and only heats it up when you turn on the tap. It takes about 3 seconds and therefore saves a reasonable amount of time compared with boiling water in an electric kettle.

Quick & Hot is equally as energy efficient as an electric kettle and actually reduces the electricity consumption if you normally boil too much water in your electric kettle. For this reason there are advantages to replacing your electric kettle with Quick & Hot, particularly if your kettle requires the heating element to be covered with water, which means that you will always throw away a certain amount of unused water. Standby consumption is just 1.42 watts.