Hey, just curious... when you say that it takes a specific amount of joules to heat water, why is the time variable, surface area of the body of water and surrounding temperature ignored? It seems so weird to me to hear that it takes a fixed amount of energy to heat water from temperature A to temperature B. I feel there are so many more variables involved.

Are you just ignoring variables for the sake of being able to give an answer? Seems to me like a classic scenario of "they taught me to ignore these variables in physics class". Or am I wrong? I'm very curious. I was trying to solve it logically but it wasn't possible due to missing variables. I have no clue about thermodynamics.