Hot water boiler & dispensing tower

Holds a reservoir of water at a controlled temperature and dispenses it on demand, so a tea order never waits behind a kettle.

An insulated tank, an immersion element under thermostatic control, and a draw-off tap. Four things separate one unit from another, and tank size is not among them. RECOVERY: how fast the element replaces the heat that leaves with each pot — a question of element power against draw rate, which is why a large tank with a weak element is slower in a rush than a small tank with a strong one. STRATIFICATION: hot water rises, so where the thermostat senses and where the tap draws from decide whether the water reaching the pot is the temperature shown on the display. SCALE: the element is the hottest wetted surface on the bar and it is where hardness precipitates first, long before anything visible appears in the tank. FRESHNESS: water held hot for hours loses dissolved gas, and tea made from long-held water tastes flat in a way no adjustment to leaf or time will fix — which is the argument for a unit that is drawn down and refilled over one that is topped up and left standing.

• Start from the tea share of the ticket mix at your PEAK hour, not from the daily tea count. A tea order and an espresso order arrive in the same minute, and the boiler exists so that the second one does not wait for the first. If tea is a trickle spread across the day, a kettle is the right answer and the counter space is worth more than the tower.
• Size on recovery and simultaneous draw-off, never on tank volume. The number a supplier leads with is capacity; the thing a queue feels is how fast the element replaces what you just poured. Ask what happens when three pots are filled back to back, and ask it about the unit you are buying rather than the range.
• Let the MENU decide set points, and be honest about it. A menu of black tea and herbal infusions is served correctly by a single near-boil set point, and the money saved belongs elsewhere. The moment green, white, oolong or matcha is on the menu, you are choosing between a selectable-set-point unit and a written tempering step that your team will skip under pressure. Both are defensible; pretending the second one is free is not.
• Match the dispense to the vessel, not to the cup. Measure the tallest thing you will fill — a stacked concentrate pot, a service teapot, a two-litre jug for a table — and check it clears the tap with the drip tray in place. A tower that only fills cups forces the team to fill big vessels somewhere else, and that somewhere else is usually the espresso machine's tap.
• Treat manual fill as a discipline cost, not a saving. A manual-fill unit is cheaper to buy and cheaper to install, and it transfers a recurring task to a rota. That task is only free if it appears in the opening checklist and in the handover; if it lives in someone's head, budget for the morning it runs dry with a queue at the till.
• Specify water treatment BEFORE you specify the boiler, from a test of the supply that will actually feed it. A boiler is a scale trap by design — it holds hot water still, which is the ideal condition for hardness to come out of solution onto the hottest surface in the machine. The element is what dies, and it dies quietly over months. This is the same question the water category answers; do not answer it twice and differently.
• Site it where the public cannot reach the tap and where the steam plume goes nowhere useful. Near-boiling water dispensed at counter height is the most credible burn risk in this category. Where guests can reach it, the tap needs to be a deliberate two-action or shielded type, and the decision belongs in the layout, not in a sign.
• Ask whether the espresso machine's hot water tap already covers the volume before you buy a second heated vessel. For a bar where tea is genuinely occasional, a dedicated boiler is capital, counter space and a maintenance line you may not need — but read the hot water tap entry first, because that convenience is paid for out of steam capacity at exactly the wrong moment.
• Confirm the electrical supply, and for a plumbed unit the water connection and tray drainage, with a licensed professional before ordering. What the site can deliver and what the local authority permits are both questions for people who are accountable for the answer, and they are cheapest to ask while the layout is still on paper.