Kitchen appliances chat

Instant hot water taps. Quooker the OG but more twice the price of many offerings now. Worth it or all much of a muchness?

Cheers

I've a selection of different pasta dies for my Kenwood chef. I can make pasta for two pretty quickly but family of 4 takes a while. It's mostly a Sunday afternoon job rather than a Wednesday night after work

I'm just going all-in on my pasta making. Ordered the various pasta roller attachment thingies for my Kenwood Chef, most likely will make fettuccine all the time. I want to make a better gluten free pasta for my partner than what we mostly find in the shops, but I'll absolutely be making larger batches of regular pasta for myself that I can work through slowly.

So... you use the extrusion attachment? I assume this is the most time consuming part of the job that makes it a Sunday afternoon rather than Wednesday evening task?

Oh cheers, @dancing james and @Grumpy_Git I'll get one next time I run into some money that needs spending.

Also, to speed up rolling I recommend making a closed loop. Saw it on Masterchef Australia or some such once, not sure if it's common practice?

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When I am feeling fancy I do that! Most important is getting the pasta to the width of the rollers and having enough in there to form the loop.

Helen Rennie has a good video on how to get the pasta to the right width.

I use the extruder. It feels really slow but actually is about the right work rate to be able to do things like cut, dust and hang the pasta while it keeps coming out.

I've a worktop mounted roller machine for sheet pasta that's really quick.

You really have to manage the extruded pastas. Cut them to length as it's extruded, not overfill or underfill the hopper to keep consistent shape (too much and it clogs or really slows down, too little and it doesn't press through or gets stringy). Plus you have to spread and flour the finished pasta so it doesnt stick together and glob up. I'm not selling it am I? But I love making pasta this way. It's just not an automated process.

One trick is to finish with bread as that pushes out the last of the dough, means 100% usage and easier clean up.

I'm back to being extremely confused about dishwashers

We bought as bosch (60cm, fully integrated) from john lewis, arrived the fitters couldn't install because we need sliding hinges (ikea cabinets, ikea dishwasher with sliding hinges just now).

I had thought we could use the existing hinges on any new dishwasher but they said no.

Now the only non-ikea sliding hinge dishwashers I can find are from AEG and in budget they are very long lead-times.

Any alternatives?

https://www.adapt-r.co.uk/

IKEA also sell similar adapters https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/behjaelplig-sliding-hinge-fully-int-dishwasher-60492349/

Both look fairly similar, they attach door front to bottom of the kitchen units so it pivots.

The YouTube video from adapt-r helped during a frustrating install. The Ikea manual looks a nightmare.

@rogan Have used the IKEA Behjalplig ones on a Bosch in my last place without any problem.
Recommended it recently, possibly to @Bainbridge?

Gah, super annoying I was convinced this was possible too but they john lewis fitters were certain, I'm going to end up reordering and getting them to install without the door and fitting the door myself arent i..

Yeah I fitted in myself - bit faffy but ok.

Microwave is turning on but not heating things up. built in AEG jobbie. It’s fucked isn’t it? 😔

Instant hot water taps.

A little late to the conversion I'm afraid but no.

Seriously? Would you switch a kettle on every 15 minutes? Because that's what these things are doing.

This is a consumer product that came from things like Zip Boiler stuff.

If you have 50 workers trying make a cup of tea/coffee at the same time then Instantaneous Electrical Hot Water Heaters become sensible.

Having a cuppa at home? No.

Just fill a kettle with enough cold water to fill the cup.

Interesting - I'm not hugely coming at this from an economy of electric angle (although that would be nice), more the convenience. I must make 10 cups of a tea a day at home easy whenever I'm there. I'm sure I've heard that they provided an efficiency via use of insulation etc but if they're doing the equivalent of boiling from cold every 15 mins that's clearly nonsense. Will look into it more, but looking unlikely within budget anyway. Cheers for input.

I can tell you that they don't get to 100 C for tea making.

Maybe 90 to 95 C. Ok for coffee or non black tea maybe.

I didn't say they were boiling from cold. They are just switching back on every 15 minutes to raise the temperature again. You are looking at doing that to a 2.5L water tank to keep the temperature.

10 cups of tea (UK standard cup is 250ml give or take) in a kettle is 2.5L of water or 2.5L continuously heating?

I know which is cheaper.

Go induction on a hob and just use a stove top kettle with a wide base.

Ridiculously quick, 30s to boiling is barely time to get a cup and choose the tea you want to make.

And these are electrically efficient too.

Changing a hob to make a lot of tea seems crazy, but if you're redoing a kitchen and looking at things like taps that deliver 90-95c hot water then you may already be considering a hob change, so this is just two birds with one stone.

I’ve been hugely impressed with the boiling speed of induction, definitely had things boil over as I hadn’t expected it to work so quickly.

I thought of an instant boiling tap, but actually don’t use boiling water all that often. I heat water to 80-85 degrees for coffee and green/jasmine style teas, and filling a pot of 3+ litres of water for pasta and potatoes is better on the induction hob.

The big ring on an induction hob is likely around 3 kW, same as an electric kettle, and pesky laws of physics mean they boil in exactly the same time. What I think you've done is discover the magic of boiling much less water.

Those instant tap things use the equivalent of 11 W continuous on standby last time I looked into it, which is about the same as boiling 3 litres of water per day.

Microwave is turning on but not heating things up

The electronics in a non-inverter microwave are ultimately just an elaborate on-off switch for the magnetron, via a relay. So either the relay is fucked, the magnetron is fucked, or some fuse or safety interlock has gone.

What I think you've done is discover the magic of boiling much less water.

What I think I've done is increase the surface area being heated and made the water shallower.

I have one of these https://uk.alessi.com/collections/kettles/products/tea-rex-kettle and it does boil quicker than one of these which I also have https://www.dualit.com/products/lite-jug-kettles

I was fascinated enough to do a race... the Alessi on the hob won by a significant amount. But yes I realise that the power draw is equal (silly smart house + Home Assistant + Grafana all said so), but still the Alessi boils sooner.

This will likely now send me down a wikipedia thermodynamics rabbit hole as I seek to understand the physics of it, but a quick hunch feels like it would be true that if one is increasing the contact area of the heated surface on the liquid and reducing the depth of the liquid, then it kinda makes sense it's accelerating the heating even for the same energy being applied (even if that energy is itself spread over a larger surface and less intense than the smaller surface). idk... will Google.

Umm...

I'm getting the impression that it's one of these Cold/Hot/Instant water taps that are all the rage nowadays.

The smaller the units are the less efficient they are. Posh Induction Hobs aside.

Nice you have a kettle that whistles but mostly people use a plug in one.

We don't fit instant 'tea urns' unless there are over 50 staff over 24 hours.

Is this the £40K Kitchen Thread all over again?