In a 2013 TED talk, design consultant Leyla Acaroglu shared an odd statistic with the crowd: In the United Kingdom, 65 percent of tea drinkers overfill their kettles and boil more water than is needed for a cup of tea. Turns out, that extra energy—the energy used to heat thrown out or leftover water—is enough to light all the streetlights in London for a night.

Between the tea and London streetlights, this problem sounds pretty specific to Brits. But heating up too much water is a universal habit. Maybe it’s tea in Japan, or pour over coffee in the United States—we all do it, and therefore, we’re all wasting energy. A kettle like this one could help solve that particular problem.

Calling Miito a kettle is a little misleading. It’s designed to replace electric kettles, but it’s actually a portable induction stove shaped like a hockey puck. It comes with a magnetic electric rod that gets dunked into whatever cup of liquid is sitting on top of the Miito. Once the rod makes contact with the induction top, Miito sends out an electromagnetic field, the rod gets hot, heating up the liquid along with it.

While neat, saving energy isn’t the sexiest proposition for consumers, and Miito wasn’t born out of an eco-friendly agenda. Nils Chudy first became interested in redesigning the tea kettle while he was a student at Design Academy Eindhoven in The Netherlands. “If you Google ‘electric kettle’ you get a copy of the same electric kettle all over again,” he says. “They all look streamlined, like a high speed train, or like a rendering in plastic. They’re all the same.” Plus, electric kettles (the norm in European kitchens) can be unsanitary: limestone builds up on the inside, and the shape of them makes it hard to scrub out the inside with a sponge.

While considering the electric kettle problem, Chudy caught wind of Acaroglu’s TED talk, and realized the opportunity to design a product for heating up specific amounts of liquid, and no more. As a designer, Chudy also saw the appeal in a kitchen appliance that required just a few steps to use: “No one wants to spend extra time near their kettle, or spend more personal energy. It should be as simple as possible. And if you have to press a button for the given amount, that’s annoying.”

Miito is still a prototype, but down the road Chudy and his design partner Jasmina Grase see Miito as a helpful solution for parents who are constantly heating up formula for newborns, or anyone who lives in cities, where kitchen space is hard to come by. “We have dreams for the future," Chudy says. "There could be other things—like in the Asian world they cook a lot of rice, so you could have a very small rice cooker. It’s a long term, five- or seven-year dream for a lot of different things that need heating.”