Which is more energy efficient: heating a given volume of water all at once, or in two batches?
I have an electric kettle, and a large urn of room temperature filtered water, which I use for tea. If I'm making tea for two people who aren't going to be drinking it at the same time, is it more energy efficient to boil the water separately, all at once, or no difference?
@Fishercat I'm pretty sure the key to efficient hot water is small surface area where things cool down. Chances are heating it all at once in one big batch is going to give you the optimum here. If you are thinking about re-heating, the number of varables grows way too large for me to make an educated guess.
If you want to make sure your'e actually doing things right, you could always do the experimental sciency route and record a statistically relevant batch of data, analyze it, consider what might've scewed the data and draw your conclusion from there.
Ah. I'm enough of a purist that I only boil as much water for tea as I'm going to use immediately. If I boil or heat the same water more than once, the tea isn't as nice.
I could go the sciencey route, but it was just an idle thought as I was making tea. I'm more interested in the answer, which I was sure other people would already have, than repeating the experiment(s) myself.
Fishercat
Mensh123