We’ve all been there before: After not drinking hot tea for months, if not years, suddenly the urge to drink some colorful leaf water hits you. Except you only have two minutes to boil the water, and your American kettle’s going to take way longer than that. What are you to possibly do? Go without tea? If you only own gas cars, that’s exactly what you’ll do, but if you happen to own an electric vehicle and also have a Level 2 home charger, at least you have options.
And by options, I mean you could order a British tea kettle, wire up an adapter, plug it in, and have water boiling before you know it. Would a normal person ever actually do it? Not a chance. Is it in any way practical? Of course not. Should you try it? Please don’t. But is it still a fun little experiment and exactly the kind of thing YouTube was created for? Absolutely. Plus, how could anyone possibly be expected not to at least wonder what else you could do with the giant charger cable that’s currently plugged into their Polestar 2.
Thankfully, our friend Alec Watson from Technology Connections is no normal person, and he also happens to have a wildly successful YouTube channel, which means he actually did recently give the idea a try. And what do you know, it actually works.
A very cursed adapter built using very cursed parts
Again, I need to emphasize that you should not do this at home. It’s all risk and literally zero reward. Unless you film what happens, in which case, I’m sure it isn’t that risky. I mean, yes, he does describe using a “very cursed adapter [he] built using very cursed parts,” but it’s just electricity and wires. If you trust yourself to do electrical work, then I trust you to do electrical work.
Of course, since this whole thing starts with a British kettle, you’re going to need something to plug the weird British plug into. And luckily for you, for some reason, Leviton sells a BS 1363 receptacle that fits a North American junction box. After all, if you’re going to do something weird, you might as well make it really weird. Wire it up to a J1772 connector, do something nerdy to make the charge cable think it’s hooked up to a car, and you’re good to go.
So, how much faster did it boil water? Almost exactly twice as fast as the regular American kettle, which makes sense when you remember the British kettle draws double the voltage. And most importantly, there was no fire. With a little determination, though, maybe you could be the one to show the internet what the version that ends with a house fire looks like. Or, you know, just stick to boiling water for tea in the microwave like a normal person.
