How many times have you been frustrated waiting for a pot of water to boil? Fortunately, the wait time has just been reduced.

While most recent culinary inventions have focused on making pots and pans nonstick, Dr. Thomas Povey recently decided he would turn his attention to making pots energy efficient. The result is the Flare Pot. This pot uses 30 percent less energy to bring water to boil than an average pot.

Dr. Povey’s background is in crafting cooling systems used in jet engines and created the Flare Pot in his spare time. The desire to design a more energy efficient pot came when he was camping and noticed that the wind caused much of the gas intended to heat the traditional pot to go to waste. He estimated that up to 90 percent of the fuel needed to heat the pot was being blown away.

He considered working on a new pot to fix the problem, but other manufactures beat him to the idea. Many camping and hard-weather cooking pots appeared on the market. Dr. Povey found satisfaction in using them, and he dropped his idea. However, the idea came back to him a few years later when he realized there wasn’t yet a pot that could be used in an average kitchen. He realized the design challenge would be different; the pot would need to be energy efficient, functional, durable, affordable, as well as aesthetically pleasing.

Dr. Povey took the design of the existing outdoor pots and applied it to a kitchen pot. Basically, the fins guide the flames to spread across a greater surface area of the pot. This allows the pot to heat faster, resulting in less fuel being needed to heart the pot. The same type of heat transfer mechanism is used in motorcycle engines and jet engines.

The idea was rather simple, but it was complicated to execute. For example, an earlier prototype was 100 percent more effective but had a design that consumers would be unlikely to accept. No one would want it in their kitchen. The final result is much more attractive and is being sold through Lakeland.