Quooker taps

Fuzzb3k · 17 Sep 2019 at 21:22

jpaul said:
how hard ? looks as though it's easy to clean though, and not attached to vessel ?

[

we use a Brita atm exclusively for tea/coffee to stop the hardness/scum
]

I tested our water using a hard water kit and it was about 280 - 300 mg/L.

jpaul · 19 Sep 2019 at 12:13

With high water hardness, I would want a combined water softener with the tap, if you didn't already have a filter in the house,
since tea, at least is scummy here @300, without softened water.

DB_SamX · 22 Sep 2019 at 11:43

My old job in Wimbledon had a quooker tap in its office with around 60 people. It was used a lot obviously for tea rounds and otherwise.

It started dripping and needed fixing or servicing every couple of months.

ANDARIAL · 22 Sep 2019 at 12:03

@ those prices
I had not realised they are soooo expensive

Wegason · 24 Sep 2019 at 18:55

They're blooming expensive to run as well. Colleague at work has one, praises it to high heaven but then moans at other times about high utility bills.

HungryHippos · 24 Sep 2019 at 20:25

Wegason said:
They're blooming expensive to run as well. Colleague at work has one, praises it to high heaven but then moans at other times about high utility bills.

Without knowing their power consumption habits it's hard to blanket make that statement.

Quooker say it costs about 1p per litre of boiling water delivered. The tank will use power in standby keeping the water boiling, but they make the tank pretty well insulated so it shouldn't lose heat too badly.

So if not delivering any water, they reckon it's about 3p per day to keep the tank boiled and ready to go.

Their complaints about power consumption could easily be related to anything else.

SpeedFreak · 24 Sep 2019 at 21:27

DB_SamX said:
My old job in Wimbledon had a quooker tap in its office with around 60 people. It was used a lot obviously for tea rounds and otherwise.

It started dripping and needed fixing or servicing every couple of months.

So scaling for a family of 4 about once every 3 years?

jpaul · 24 Sep 2019 at 23:26

if you have a fast 3kw kettle usually about 3 minutes to boil 1l of water - so thats 1/20th of an hour or 0.05*3=0.15Kw/hrs ~ 2p at 15p/unit
which should be similar to a boiling tap.

for tea/coffee making, I reflected that usually they say you should use freshly boiled water too.

HungryHippos · 24 Sep 2019 at 23:40

jpaul said:
if you have a fast 3kw kettle usually about 3 minutes to boil 1l of water - so thats 1/20th of an hour or 0.05*3=0.15Kw/hrs ~ 2p at 15p/unit
which should be similar to a boiling tap.

for tea/coffee making, I reflected that usually they say you should use freshly boiled water too.

That is a good point, primary usage is definitely tea, but I won't always have fresh milk on hand so not using it every day religiously.

Would get more use out of it consecutively on a weekend when I'm at home more.

Anyone had this type of tap and made any comparisons about how it tastes for tea?

jpaul · 25 Sep 2019 at 09:39

yes .. I suppose if we had one could potentially use the first tank of hot water, in the morning, for washing up dishes of previous day,
and that's more efficient than getting it through the piping from the boiler, which would leave new water for a pot of tea...
otherwise, water sitting ovenight in a container with accumulated scale doesn't sound attractive.

er - rethinking - .. maybe not if the quooker is not at the sink edge.

branddaly · 25 Sep 2019 at 20:50

Wegason said:
They're blooming expensive to run as well. Colleague at work has one, praises it to high heaven but then moans at other times about high utility bills.

It’s had no noticeable impact on my electricity usage. I did replace my fridge freezer and dishwasher with much more efficient ones, so it could be costing slightly more to run. It’s definitely not causing my utility bills to go sky high.

Fuzzb3k · 25 Sep 2019 at 21:52

I've got our Quooker tap plugged into a TP-Link smart plug with energy monitoring, and I've got a script which logs a bunch of metrics which has been tootling along for a couple of years.

This is what our power usage looks like for the past week:

On average the tap uses between 0.5 to 1 kWh per day, so between 7p and 14p ish.

HungryHippos · 25 Sep 2019 at 22:00

Fuzzb3k said:
I've got our Quooker tap plugged into a TP-Link smart plug with energy monitoring, and I've got a script which logs a bunch of metrics which has been tootling along for a couple of years.

This is what our power usage looks like for the past week:

On average the tap uses between 0.5 to 1 kWh per day, so between 7p and 14p ish.

Pretty cool! also useful to see that it looks like it would hit about 0.3kwh per day if not used at all. I guess the spikes are from the water being used/topped up and then heated up.

Even at 1kwh per day it would be 14p per day, and that would be a cost compared to boiling a kettle.

Is yours boiling water only, or is it the combi version for hot water also?

djjuk · 25 Sep 2019 at 22:02

We've got the fusion. Wouldn't be without it now. Great bit of kit and no problems in a year or so since it was installed.

Fuzzb3k · 25 Sep 2019 at 23:06

HungryHippos said:
Pretty cool! also useful to see that it looks like it would hit about 0.3kwh per day if not used at all. I guess the spikes are from the water being used/topped up and then heated up.

Even at 1kwh per day it would be 14p per day, and that would be a cost compared to boiling a kettle.

Is yours boiling water only, or is it the combi version for hot water also?

We've got the boiling water version. They didn't have the fancy-dan versions back when we got it

Having said that, we have an unvented hot water cylinder that is already storing hot water, so I'm not sure we'd see any benefit to having a separate hot water feed from the Quooker tank.

HungryHippos · 25 Sep 2019 at 23:53

Fuzzb3k said:
We've got the boiling water version. They didn't have the fancy-dan versions back when we got it Having said that, we have an unvented hot water cylinder that is already storing hot water, so I'm not sure we'd see any benefit to having a separate hot water feed from the Quooker tank.

Gas boiler will always be more efficient compared to electric, I think the combi thing sounds appealing if you can't get a good hot water feed in from anywhere nearby.

How much maintenance does yours require by the way? do you need to replace filters etc?

Fuzzb3k · 28 Sep 2019 at 23:01

HungryHippos said:
Gas boiler will always be more efficient compared to electric, I think the combi thing sounds appealing if you can't get a good hot water feed in from anywhere nearby.

How much maintenance does yours require by the way? do you need to replace filters etc?

It doesn't require much maintenance to be fair. Every year I clean and descale the tank and then every other year I also replace the HiTAC filter. It's a bit of a faff to open it up and descale it. It probably takes about 2 hours or so in total, so not the end of the world every year. i also pop the tap head attachment in some descaling solution to clean off any excess limescale.

The past couple of years has resulted in quite a lot of scale build up each time (as you can see from the photos I posted), so this time round I've decided to put a polyphospate filter (https://www.screwfix.com/p/bwt-poly...ge/88345#product_additional_details_container) in-between the cold water supply and the Quooker tap to reduce / eliminate the scale.

HungryHippos · 29 Sep 2019 at 16:32

Fuzzb3k said:
It doesn't require much maintenance to be fair. Every year I clean and descale the tank and then every other year I also replace the HiTAC filter. It's a bit of a faff to open it up and descale it. It probably takes about 2 hours or so in total, so not the end of the world every year. i also pop the tap head attachment in some descaling solution to clean off any excess limescale.

The past couple of years has resulted in quite a lot of scale build up each time (as you can see from the photos I posted), so this time round I've decided to put a polyphospate filter (https://www.screwfix.com/p/bwt-poly...ge/88345#product_additional_details_container) in-between the cold water supply and the Quooker tap to reduce / eliminate the scale.

If buying mine I would get the scale thing, wonder if that's a newer option. Think it sits between the supply and the tank itself to descale it, says it lasts about 40K litres, so for me that would be literal years.

jpaul · 29 Sep 2019 at 17:46

Fuzzb3k said:
I've got our Quooker tap plugged into a TP-Link smart plug with energy monitoring, and I've got a script which logs a bunch of metrics which has been tootling along for a couple of years.
This is what our power usage looks like for the past week:

charts are nice indeed (I guess you need a pc live all the time to receive the data) .. when the inhouse smart meter displays can do that I'm more interested.

I subsequently re-attached a maplin energy monitor to 3KW kettle which was giving me 0.04/0.13 KW/hrs for boiling a 250ml(cup of coffee)/1.2l(pot of tea)
and average about 0.5KW/hr a day 7p for 4 coffees / 2 teas / rinsing dishes.

Fuzzb3k said:
so this time round I've decided to put a polyphospate filter

although these stop fur in the Quooker

These devices leak polyphosphate (a food-grade chemical) into the water. Any metallic heating element immediately after the device becomes coated in a protective layer of polyphosphate. This prevents limescale from sticking to it when the water is heated.

I'd prefer something that replaces the need for a britta water softener we use for tea&coffee to avoid scum (ie ion exchange. / salt rejuvination)

LuckyBenski · 29 Sep 2019 at 18:09

Keep an eye on the units, kWh is energy used as you've measured above. kW is the contuous power usage (power = while flowing, energy = sum total).

jpaul said:
I'd prefer something that replaces the need for a britta water softener we use for tea&coffee to avoid scum (ie ion exchange. / salt rejuvination

Good point - if it's not sticking to your tank, it's going into your brew!