Why your kettle pulls more power than a high-end GPU

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Average UK cattle uses more power than a gaming rig. And I love this because the way that gaming things are advertised, it's always so over the top visually, like a GPU. And we're trying to get across just how powerful they are by saying it's like a gorilla that's on fire shooting lightning out of its eyeballs. It's so powerful. And your kettle is a cylinder with a big metal wire in it. And it pulls more power.

[00:00:21]It's not really that close. So, like your average GPU is going to be using maybe 500 watts of power, which is quite a lot. But the average UK kettle pulls 3,000 watts of power, six times as much, just to boil water so you can have a good cup of tea. The reason for that is that heating up water is very energy intensive. You know, if you want to raise a liter of water, 1° C, it takes 4,000 jewels of energy. If you want to raise a kettle full of water from 20° C up to like boiling, you're looking at 300,000 jewels of energy you need to dump into this thing in 2 minutes, just an intensely large amount of energy you need. Versus your gaming rig, it's working in transistors. And these transistors, they open, you're just nudging electrons around, right? And to do that, you're using at jewels of energy. 10 to the minus 18 jewels of energy. just such incredibly tiny tiny amounts that even if you have millions of transistors all working at the same time, it all doesn't add up to the same as just trying to get your kettle to boil. Cheers.