Why a Quooker is for Christmas as well as for life

Santa may have lots of little helpers, but in the kitchen there’s one helper that can make all the difference at Christmas.  You may never have thought of it this way before, but boiling water is a major component of a successful Christmas.

For a start, in the days leading up to Christmas so many of us get out the best glassware and give it a careful hand wash – you don’t always want to put your best crystal in the dishwasher!  Many of us will give the house an early spring clean too, washing floors and paint work, ready for fixing decorations and receiving visitors.  This can drain a tank of hot water in no time, but if you have a Quooker COMBI, you can enjoy hot water at any time without firing up the boiler or putting on the emersion. 

That’s before the cooking starts!  Every dish of potatoes, sprouts, carrots and peas means a pan of water on the hob.  A full pan of cold water can take up to ten minutes to heat up, and that’s quite a lot of energy and money being consumed too. 

By filling each pan straight from the Quooker, you start with boiling water in every pan so all you need to do is simmer to achieve perfect vegetables.  Every Christmas dinner needs gravy and this starts with stock – you need plenty of boiling water for that too.  Many of us find cooking the Christmas lunch quite stressful; the key to this is getting the timing right, and having plenty of boiling water on demand really helps – you only have to concentrate on cooking times – not on heating up water times – and we all know that a watched pot never boils.

Using a Quooker helps you win back precious time, keep everything under control and may even give you the leeway to put your feet up for a relaxing sherry!

With a delicious lunch eaten, there’s the washing up to tackle.  This is where the Quooker becomes your secret weapon.   Fiddly items such as mixers and beaters and potentially hazardous implements like sharp knives can all be rinsed clean in seconds with boiling water from the Quooker.  The Quooker COMBI is perfect for providing all the washing up water you need and the Quooker’s boiling water stream is great for getting rid of fat on pans or roasting tins. 

A Quooker can even help with the decorations if you’re partial to a candle or two.  You can make short work of old wax from used candles to clean candle holders in no time at all, ready for new candles and a warming festive display.

Installing a Quooker will improve your life all year round, but we’d certainly never be without one at Christmas! 

Have a wonderful festive season everyone, and here’s to a very prosperous New Year!

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Why we’re totally chilled to be boiling

When you stop to think how much we need boiling water, it’s not surprising that every home once had a kettle.  The earliest electric kettle was manufactured by Crompton & Co. in 1891, using the electrical heat radiator concept devised earlier by Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton.  The kettle as we know it, with an immersed heating resistor, was devised in 1922 by Arthur Large of the Swan Company.   Unfortunately, that’s where the innovation stopped for several decades – until we took up the challenge. 

The kettle had some serious drawbacks – like the energy it consumed, the safety hazard it represented and the time it took to boil.  The inventors of the Quooker believed that true innovation was needed.  The challenge they set themselves, and the breakthrough that they achieved, was to produce the world’s only true 100ºC boiling water tap so that no-one would ever have to wait for a kettle to boil again.  They invented it to save time, energy, water and money while providing boiling water – safely – straight from the tap.  By doing so Quooker became the experts in boiling water. 

There are a host of benefits to having boiling water on tap, the most obvious being the ability to make tea and coffee straight from a Quooker tap – but there are plenty of others too.  Cooking pasta, rice and vegetables always involves boiling water, but in the past you either had to wait for a kettle to boil (several times for a large pan) or to heat cold water in the pan; both of which were time consuming.  Rinsing knives, whisks, beaters and pans clean now only takes moments with a boiling water tap, as does filling a hot water bottle, saving even more time.

In addition to the benefits of having boiling water on tap, there are unique advantages to having boiling water delivered from a Quooker tap.  The Quooker tap delivers boiling water in the most practical way possible, the patented design of the tap allows end users to rotate the tap spout 360 degrees and also allows vertical movement.  This means that when using the tap for whatever purpose the tap spout can be directed exactly where you wish the water to be delivered.  Furthermore, the aerated delivery of the 100 degree water is yet another safety aspect, helping to reduce accidents in any given household.

Occasionally, we are asked why we don’t provide a cold filtered facility on our boiling water taps.  The answer is twofold.

Firstly, we’re true to our speciality.  Other makers of hot taps can’t actually offer truly boiling water, so some do offer a combined hot and cold tap in order to compensate for the lack of 100ºC.  There’s often a dilution of expertise when you attempt to be all things to all people and we don’t compromise on excellence.

Secondly, there’s no real need.  Most of the UK has perfectly good drinkable tap water, which doesn’t need filtering, so a filtered cold tap is simply unnecessary – there’s no benefit in adding this as a feature. 

With a Quooker in a busy kitchen, if you’re using the boiling tap to help you with cooking, you can still fill a jug or glass of water for drinking from your standard cold tap.  When you’re entertaining and preparing a meal against the clock it’s a big help to have a separate cold tap and not have to ‘wait your turn’ to use a filtered tap. 

Some inventions make a profound impact on the society which they serve – fast forward a few years and we believe that the 100ºC boiling water tap will prove to be one of them. 

That’s why we’re totally chilled about being boiling. 

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Your questions answered

In this blog post, we'd like to take the opportunity to answer some of your questions.

Should you have any further questions, feel free to 'mention' us on Twitter - @QuookerUK, or leave a comment on our facebook page (links to which are at the end of this post).

I have noticed you have a COMBI, what is this?

The COMBI unlike the PRO series of VAQ’s dispenses exactly the amount of 100°C boiling water that is needed via the unique Quooker tap and also provides an instant supply of hot water (50-65°C) via your existing kitchen mixertap thus doing away with the need for a local heater and kettle in one go! This brilliant device means no more waiting for hot water, no more wasted energy, no more wasted water and no more wasted time.

Is the tap available in a left handed version?

All taps are delivered for installation on the right-hand side of the sink however you can change the handing of a tap during installation. Each tap is designed with full height adjustment and 360° rotation ensuring ease of use.

Do you offer different designs and finishes?

Quooker taps are available in four different styles and six different finishes so you will always be able to match it with your kitchen tap.

Do I need to buy a tap or can I use my existing one?

A Quooker is supplied complete with its own unique tap, all of which are specially designed and manufactured for delivery of boiling water. It is therefore an essential part and is included within the price.


Website: http://www.quooker.com
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You don't have to waste energy...

The Energy Saving Trust estimates that the average UK family uses its kettle to brew up around 1500 times a year, or roughly 4 times a day.  And why not?  After all a good cuppa does ease us awake up in the morning; helps us to stay warm in the colder months; keep us going throughout the day; and finally helps us to relax and sleep well at night. 

Actually there are quite a few reasons why you should never boil a kettle again, and one of those is the amount of energy that they consume.  Even if we weren’t faced with rapidly rising energy prices, we’re well aware these days of the need to cut our carbon footprints, but are we aware of all the ways that we could do this? 

Some of the methods of carbon cutting are well known; you can switch to low energy light bulbs, install cavity wall insulation, top up your loft insulation and turn down your central heating boiler.  But are you aware how much energy you can save by switching from a conventional kettle to an instantaneous boiling water tap?

An average kettle takes 3 minutes to boil a litre of water – about enough to make four cups of tea.  According to Which?, the average kettle also uses as much energy to boil that litre of water as it does to run your fridge for seven hours.  If on average we brew up four times a day, that means that your kettle is costing as much every 24 hours as it would take to run the fridge for 28 hours.  The kettle uses almost 15% more energy than the fridge.  Use it more than four times a day and that percentage will rise further.

Switching to a Quooker tap helps to cut your carbon footprint and your electricity bill – and both of those things help to reduce our consumption of limited fossil fuel reserves.  In the process of saving energy you also save money.  A Quooker costs just 2p a day to run, even if you use it more frequently.

You’ll also save your own energy.  Not only do you benefit from drinks made rapidly on demand, you’ll also never have to bother with filling the kettle a carrying it from the sink to the worktop.  You don’t even need to lift it to pour.  Boiling water will always be available, literally on tap, to do what ever you need it for, hot drinks, snacks, cooking, sterilising bottles, filling hot water bottles, blanching or rinsing trick to wash items such as knives and food mixer beaters.  You’d probably even find your stress levels drop.  That’s quite apart from saving water, time and effort. 

Why on earth would you ever want to put the kettle on again?

Time and boiling water…

Time flies, seize the day, life’s too short, make every second count, what a waste of time!  We’re a nation obsessed with quotations about time.  It’s understandable, because time is precious – and that’s another saying. 

Unlike anything else, you can’t get more of time; you can’t buy it and it’s difficult to trade it.  One thing is certain – once it’s gone you can’t get it back. 

Mostly people want to save time, and that’s where we score highly – quite apart from saving water, energy and money, we can help you reclaim a lot of those precious minutes.  On average, a kettle takes around three minutes to boil.  A kettle with just a little water in it will take less time, of course, but we tend to overfill kettles and boil too much water for just one cup.  This may be because we don’t really trust that the water will be nice if we only boil enough for one cup – a lot of us live in hard water areas and suffer from scaly kettles – or we’re concerned that we won’t boil enough and will have to top up the kettle and reboil it, which would, of course, be wasteful. 

Three minutes doesn’t seem long, does it?   But if you’re standing waiting for the kettle to boil, it seems ages.  So we often go and do something else while the kettle is heating the water, only to miss it boiling and let it cool while we get distracted.  So again we have to reboil, and that’s more waste. 

This pattern may well be repeated several times a day, and instead of three minutes, each time it can easily turn into five or six. 

Far better to cut out the waiting altogether – and you can with a Quooker.  Better by far to make tea, coffee or a snack instantly, then get on with the rest of your day.  Over the course of the day, this can save you quite a bit of time to do more useful things. 

It also helps not to break your concentration and focus.  Did you know that each time you are interrupted you lose about 50% of your effectiveness?  Simply going to the boiling water tap, making tea, then enjoying it before you move onto your next task, helps you to plan your productive time and your breaks more effectively. 

Even if you only take three minutes to boil a kettle four times a day, over a year that adds up to a staggering three days spent just hanging about waiting for kettles to boil. 

We could easily list a hundred more interesting things you could do with the time you could save, but it would take too much of your time to read it.  So we’ll just give you one – ditch your kettle and buy a Quooker!

Your questions answered

Every day, we receive questions from people who want to know more about our boiling water taps, so, we have answered some of your most frequently asked questions.

"Is the Quooker boiling water tap safe?"

Safety is always a prime consideration and where boiling water is concerned it is even more important. Quooker helps cut down on kitchen accidents. Every year, UK hospitals treat many thousands of adults and children for serious injuries relating to kettles (source: ROSPA). Terrible burns and scalds are caused by the fact that a kettle itself is a hot object, it contains boiling water and it can so easily be tipped or overturned and sometimes even the outside of a kettle is too warm too touch. 

By contrast, the Quooker is ultra-safe with its static tap installation, built- in childproof safety mechanism (which requires an adult hand to push and turn it on) and aerated delivery of water meaning delivery in a fine spray as opposed to direct jet. These features have resulted in an unblemished safety record despite there being over 250,000 units in operation in Europe.

"Is a Quooker something I can add to my existing kitchen or can I only have one with a new kitchen?"

A Quooker can be easily added to an existing kitchen and it only takes about 60 minutes to install and comes complete with all that is required, even the drill bit for connection at the waste. Quooker taps are available in four different styles and six different finishes so
you will always be able to match it with your kitchen tap.

"We have a granite work surface though! Can we still have a Quooker fitted?"

Not a problem and if you book your installation with a Quooker approved installer they all have special drills that allow them to cut the tap hole in any solid surface other than glass!

"The Quooker will not fit under the sink, what can I do?"

You can site the Quooker tank up to 1500 mm away from the delivery tap and extension hoses are available for this purpose.

If you have any questions for us, feel free to leave us a comment. Alternatively, you can find us on:

Twitter: @QuookerUK
Facebook: www.facebook.com/quookeruk

Time, Energy, Money and Water

Time, energy and money are probably three of the most valuable resources in most people’s lives and, for those of us on a water meter, they’ve been joined by water too. At times it may seem like we never have enough of them. Naturally, people will always try and find ways to increase the amount of time, energy and money they have, and everyone’s worst domestic nightmare would be to be without water.  Smart people will make the best use of each of them.

We live in a world where spare time is a luxury, a digital age in which so many things need a response in an instant. What we choose to do with our time ultimately defines our lives. Whether it’s working, learning or looking after loved ones, some people will feel they have too much to do and too little time. Naturally, busy people will endeavour to find all kinds of ways to save time – even if only a few minutes a day!

Energy (in terms of the stuff you need to run a home, not the sort to get you out of bed in the morning) is another commodity that is increasing in scarcity and value. As the argument for global warming strengthens and people become more aware of their carbon footprint – energy is something that we have to consume with a conscience. Not surprisingly, developments in technology are now being geared towards making household appliances as energy efficient as possible, as well as time-saving.

In times of economic austerity people make cut backs; however, money still has to be spent. So it becomes paramount to spend money wisely and make astute investments.  These days, if you’re on a water meter, water means money too, quite apart from the need to conserve it for ecological reasons. 

A product that screams efficiency and sustainability is the Quooker boiling water tap. When you first see what a Quooker tap can do, you may be impressed by its versatility, stylish design and safety features. However, four of the most significant benefits of investing in a Quooker tap are the savings that it gives in time, energy, water and money.

Quooker taps are up to 58% more energy efficient than kettles (based on making ten, 200ml mugs of tea a day). Part of the reason for this is that kettles often re-boil the same water, causing to much of it to be wasted, either through evaporation, or because people understandably feel like throwing out re-boiled water and starting again with fresh water.  With a Quooker, you just dispense the amount of fresh boiling water you need, every time.  This not only means that you will save water, not to mention money on your electricity bills, but you will always be doing your bit to help the environment.

On average, it would take around five minutes to make four cups of tea from filling the kettle to putting the teabag in the bin. With a Quooker tap, the same four cups of tea take around a minute to make. If you do this same process several times a day you are looking at saving time which could be spent getting on with work, or putting your feet up. Over the course of a year, four minutes a day adds up to 24 hours. If you make several cups a day using a Quooker tap, you’re effectively saving 24 hours each time you make a brew.

How will you spend your extra days?

Your questions answered

I have noticed Quooker delivers water at 100ºC is this important?

Yes this is of fundamental importance. Quooker is the world’s only 100°C boiling water tap and as a consequence it is the only tap on the market that truly allows you to be rid of the energy greedy kettle. (Remember if the water temperature is not at 100°C at point of delivery you will not be able to replace your kettle.)

Is the water from a Quooker always fresh?

The stainless steel tank with revolutionary vacuum insulation and thermos technology holds water under pressure (so it does not boil) at 110°C. Therefore ensuring every delivery is sterile, removing the risk of harmful bacteria such as legionella.

How can a Quooker save me money?

When we use a kettle, we waste money, energy, water and the most precious commodity of all, time! On average a kettle uses the same amount of energy to boil a litre of water as it takes to run a fridge for over seven hours. In the UK we boil our kettle on average four times a day! In contrast, Quooker with its revolutionary vacuum insulation and thermos technology is highly efficient to run and instant meaning you use only what you need when you need it.

Does it not cost a lot of energy to keep the water at 110ºC day and night?

The unique vacuum and thermos technology ensures that only 10 W of energy consumption are required to maintain the water at temperature.

Should I turn the Quooker off at all?

As the running costs are approximately 3 pence per day we recommend that you leave the system powered on at all times unless you intend leaving the property vacant for a month or more.

Perfect tea – don’t leave it to pot luck

Debate has raged for years as to the way to make the perfect cup of tea.  Do you warm the pot or not?  Should the milk go in before or after the tea?  One thing everyone seems to be agreed upon is the water.  Firstly, the water must be fresh, secondly it should be of good quality, and thirdly it must be boiling – not nearly boiling, but 100ºC.  Thanks to Quooker, you can now get this straight from the tap. 

The Dutch were the first to add milk to tea, and to coffee for that matter, but the world has never reached total agreement as to whether it should be added before or after the tea.   Traditionally, the upper classes added it last, after the tea, whereas the less well off put milk in first, as this protected their china from staining.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it was also the Dutch who first produced a genuine 100ºC boiling water tap.  In fact, they are still the only ones who do, since other would be imitators produce water at just below boiling point, which isn’t ideal for tea.  Fortunately though, this technology is now available in the UK through Quooker.  This is important for the tea-loving British, as it means that they now have a valuable time-saving short cut to making tea the way it should be made, while saving energy and avoiding water wastage.    

The most informed sources agree that the pot should be warmed; not just because of tradition, but because a cold teapot will absorb some of the heat from the boiling water and reduce its temperature – and water should be a genuine 100ºC hot to produce the finest brew. 

Opinion differs widely about what types of tea to use and whether teabags are truly acceptable, but the basic steps are clear.  First, warm the pot.  If you have a kettle, you’ll have to wait several minutes while you bring it almost to the boil, then you’ll either have to interrupt it just before it boils, or, if you get distracted, you’ll have to let it boil, warm the pot, then re-boil the kettle to make the tea, wasting energy as you do.    

With a Quooker tap, it’s much simpler to make an authentic perfect brew.  Place the empty pot under the tap and pour in some instantaneous boiling water to warm it.  Swirl this around for a few seconds until the pot feels warm, then tip it away.  Add your tea, one teaspoon or bag per cup, and put back under the tap to fill the pot with 100ºC boiling water.  Leave to brew for three to five minutes.  Pour into cups or mugs and add tea, lemon, honey or sugar as desired.

Choosing your tea is a whole other matter of course, but the principles are the same whether you favour Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Assam, green tea or any other variety.  Of course you’ll also then have a whole host of other decisions to make; a biscuit or a cake; a digestive or a Battenberg... 

It makes choosing the Quooker tap look a real no-brainer.