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Rob[_40_]

wrote:
My brother's wife wants a small water heater under the kitchen
sink. Not an instant hot water type but one that holds a couple
gallons.
There is a receptacle under the sink but it also powers the
diswasher. I am concerned that if both the dishwasher and the water
heater are on at the same time it will pop the breaker.
I am looking for a device that will allow the water heater to be on
until the diswasher starts drawing a certain amount of current, at
which point the power to the heater would be turned off.
The power to the dishwasher needs to be on all the time, only the
heater should be switched. A switch for the water heater cannot be
added. The solution needs to be plug and play and require no input
from anyone using the diswasher.
It seems to me that something like this must be available but I
can't think of what it would be called and my brain is apparently too
fuzzy this morning to get google to come up with something for me.
I am willing to build the device myself if need be but a purchased
product would be better.
Thanks,
Eric

They are available here in the Netherlands, and are/were commonly used
to connect a washer and a dryer to a single circuit.
These boxes cover the same situation, where a washing machine consumes
a lot of power during the phase where it heats the water and could trip
the breaker when a dryer which also uses a lot of power is used at the
same time.

I don't know if they are available for the same purpose in the USA.
And also I don't think they would still work so well as it did in the
past, where such household equipment would still have an electromechanical
controller and could reliably be paused by just cutting the line current.
Todays machines with a microprocessor maybe would not handle this so well.
But in your use case (with a close-in heater) that should not be an issue.