Leif. posted:

I made the mistake of not using hot water when filling up the freaking massive pot, not realizing how long it would take to heat up the whole thing from 80 Farenheit. Holy poo poo. It took forever. It creeps up at about 1 degree per minute on average, occasionally going up in spurts of .3-.5 over 5-6 seconds, and then stalling out, even decreasing by .1 or .2, then recovering and going again. Granted, in my case it was a massive amount of water that it was heating up by nearly 60 degrees, but I was kind of expecting a more powerful heating element. If you started with water from an insta-hot, or start with near-boiling water and then add cool water to bring it down, you might be better off. Looking for ways to speed the time up, I started scooping water out down to the "min" line with a cup, and replacing it back up to my desired level with water from the insta-hot; as one might expect, both actions (lowering the amount of water in the pot and adding hot water to it) raised the temperature fairly quickly. This cut the time down to around 25 minutes to heat it up from 80 degrees