Experiment 1 - What boils faster?

It's a daily reminder from my mom: don't forget to salt your water when you're making pasta, something I usually forget. For this reason I always put the salt into the water right away but my mother always insists that it be added after the water is already boiling. Does it really make a difference? Today I will be testing the hypothesis that salted water boils faster than unsalted water. In this experiment the independent variable was whether or not the water contained salt and the dependent variable was the amount of time it took the water to boil.

To do this I used:
-  4 burner stove top
- two pots (preferably the same size)
- measuring cup
- measuring spoon

- salt

- water

- stop watch

First I took both of my pots and filled each of them with four cups of water using my measuring cup. Next I measured one tablespoon of salt with a measuring spoon and put it into one of the pots. Next I placed both pots on their own burner. I turned both the burners to high and started the stop watch. I timed the two pots until they came to a rolling boil. After both pots came to a rolling boil I took the pots of the heat, let them cool for 5 hours and redid the process switching which pot had salt and which pot did not have salt. I also switched which pot was on which burner.

Picture 1: set up including two pots on burners 

Picture 2: pot 1 with salt 

Picture 3: pot 2 with no salt 

Picture 4: measuring cup and measuring spoon 

Picture 5: pot two at a rolling boil 

Picture 6: pot 2 with salt at a rolling boil

Results:
round 1
- pot 1 with salt took 6 minutes and 30 seconds to come to a rolling boil
- pot 2 with no salt took 4 minutes and 45 seconds to come to a rolling boil
round 2
- pot 1 with no salt took 6 minutes and 20 seconds to come to a rolling boil
- pot 2 with salt took 7 minutes and 7 seconds to come to a rolling boil

Average time to boil with salt was 6 minutes and 48 seconds to come to a rolling boil
Average time to boil with no salt was 5 minutes and 32 seconds to come to a rolling boil

Because of these results I can reject the null hypothesis which was the salt in the water would have no effect on the amount of time it takes for the water boil. In a perfect world, I would have had the exact same pot used for both treatments however I used to two pots that were of similar size. To account for this I did both treatments in both pots and took an average of the two.