Why Choose a Boiling Water Tap for your Kitchen and are they worthwhile?

I love a good cup of tea; whether on a cold winter’s day, after a bad day or fol­low­ing bad news (every­one knows tea is the best answer for a crisis!) to soothe a hangover, or just to get me going each morn­ing when I first get up! But along with the rest of the pop­u­la­tion one of the things I don’t have much patience for is wait­ing for the kettle to boil, and this is where a boil­ing water tap is a total won­der to behold!

Hot water taps are instant and there­fore very con­veni­ent, mak­ing them per­fect for the every­day mod­ern busy life­style! Aside from tea, hot water taps save time with cook­ing pasta or veget­ables, for thaw­ing frozen foods, wash­ing up, and for ster­il­ising babies bottles. The lat­ter is one I am not per­son­ally famil­iar with but my col­leagues who have chil­dren (though they looked hor­ri­fied at the memory!) advised that babies need feed­ing every 3 hours, so based on a kettle tak­ing 10 minutes each time to boil, 8 feeds per day works out at 1 .5 hours each day wait­ing on a kettle boil­ing! (.…And I am told this feels like a life­time if you are the unfor­tu­nate one who’s turn it is to deal with a night-feed!) There­fore, not just for me and my tea habit, but for new par­ents too, instant hot water taps are ideal, con­veni­ent and the per­fect time-saver.

So how do boiling water tap work?

The boil­ing water tap usu­ally sits on the work­top or counter next to the sink and has a thermally insu­lated tank hid­den out of sight beneath the sink unit.

There are many mod­els and styles avail­able but the boil­ing water tap typ­ic­ally looks like an ordin­ary tap except with more levers or but­tons to assist its func­tion­al­ity depend­ing on what options you want; there are taps that dis­pense only boil­ing water or some are tem­per­at­ure con­trol­lable from the tap head so can also pro­duce hot, cool or chilled water, as well as spark­ling or even car­bon­ated water!

Most mod­els have a boiler unit of approx­im­ately 2 litre capa­city so cold water is first filtered and then enters the boiler for heat­ing, (with a sep­ar­ate feed for the cold water dir­ect­ing it else­where after filtering). The water is heated within the tank to between 98°C and 100°C and then dis­pensed through the tap on the worktop.

Are Boiling Water Taps safe?

For any­one using a boil­ing water tap for the first time, whether it is your­self or a guest in your home it is essen­tial to ensure their safety, and for this most taps come with safety options to pre­vent injury. This is also sig­ni­fic­ant if you have chil­dren of any age, keep­ing them safe from splashes or else pre­vent­ing them from try­ing to use the tap them­selves. Most boil­ing water mod­els also include a fil­ter which means the qual­ity of the water is likely to be bet­ter and safer.

Are Boiling Water Taps cost effective?

Boil­ing water taps use up less water than when boil­ing a kettle as people gen­er­ally always fill kettles with more water than they actu­ally need. Typ­ic­ally the tank would hold enough to make more than 25 instantly hot cups of tea per hour, (which is cer­tainly more than most house­holds could ever get through!) and for it to reheat would take approx­im­ately 10 minutes.

It doesn’t take much energy to keep the water in the boiler hot as once heated the tank is very well insu­lated but how eco-friendly they are var­ies between dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers. Our advice to people con­sid­er­ing a boil­ing water tap is that it is not expens­ive to keep the water warm but it is to keep reheat­ing it; this gen­er­ally means that as long as you don’t use it for large quant­it­ies of water, such as if you’re boil­ing mul­tiple pans of water sim­ul­tan­eously, then gen­er­ally run­ning costs are inexpensive.

If inter­ested in the boil­ing water taps then the main man­u­fac­tur­ers of these are Quooker, Insinkerator, Franke, Grohe, Hotspot.

So….who’s up for a cup of tea?