I've heard that electric kettles don't work as well in the US as in (say) England because our mains voltage is much lower -- and I guess a transformer would be too bulky.
I think this is probably true - in the UK (and EU) our kettles are 3 kW, maxing out our 230 V / 13 A plug/sockets.
American plugs always seemed relatively anaemic (and scary dangerous - where are the switches? where is the Earth? though the EU are also typically unswitched), though you do get to have less bulky mobile phone chargers as a result!
> (and scary dangerous - where are the switches? where is the Earth? though the EU are also typically unswitched)
well the bottom prong on a cord is the ground and anything that is not a wallwort is polarized nowadays so that the neutral and hot are always on the right wire.
by switched you mean it has a fuse in the plug? if so that's not something that america does. we have 15A circuits going to different parts of the house and if there is a possibility of water immersion there will be a GFCI circuit breaker or outlet installed to protect all downstream outlets. overall it works well enough that there aren't a massive number of deaths caused by it. usually you have do something exceptional to be electrocuted.
edit: the kettle I have is 1500 Watts and at 120 volts it's ~12A of current.
Kitchen and dining room circuits are required to be 20 A and GFCI in the US so you could up the wattage if need be. I doubt such a thing exists, though.
They are NOW required to be that, but a lot of legacy circuits are still 15A, and some even don't have GFCI (GFCI only became a requirement in the late 70s/early 80s in the kitchen, bathroom, and anywhere else that can conceivably be near water.
This has spread to AFCI (arc fault instead of ground fault) being put in every bedroom as a requirement as well.
If your house doesn't have GFCI and AFCI everywhere, they're required, you proobably should start retrofitting your sockets.
All of that said, you can use temporary use 1800W devices on 15A legally without tripping the breaker.
It has absolutely nothing to do with use of transformers. Sockets in US and in UK are fused at approximately 13Amps for safety reasons. And 110V at 13amps is 1430W, while 230V at 13 amps is 2990W. You can make a kettle which uses only 1430W of power, but it would take much longer to boil water than a 3kW kettle would. You could raise the voltage to any number you like,but if the socket is fused at 13A you are not going to draw any more power out.
