Offgrid living

1069 readers

1 users here now

Everything off grid; power, water, self-sufficiency; whether you're doing it or aspiring.

For mobile forms of off-grid living, consider taking a look at:

c/houseless@lemmy.sdf.org

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

CadeJohnson@slrpnk.net

perestroika@slrpnk.net

Cooking on PV electric (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by oeuf@slrpnk.net to c/offgrid@slrpnk.net

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm trying to get an idea of whether it would be viable for us to upgrade our PV and switch from propane to electric for cooking.

Is anyone else cooking on PV-powered electric, and do you have a rough estimate of the kWh used for it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Chewie@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

We have a small flight case on wheels that we use as an outside kitchen with the following appliances:

1 induction hob - 1.9KW max
1 rice cooker - 400W, which also works as a slow cooker
1 small oven / grill - 800w
1 "travel" kettle (0.5l) - 900w

They are all plugged into a 2500W low-frequency inverter which is connected to a 48V 5KwH LiFePO4 battery, and is serviced by 3 PV systems, two 800w and 1 360w in various position.

I would recommend not using 12 or 24v for cooking, as your cables will have to be really short and thick.

We can use all the appliances at once on the inverter (athough the inverter is rated for 3kw over 4 minutes max which helps) without problems.

Last year, we cooked on it every day for around 2 weeks when the weather was good (and I was working from the garden), and it was very reliable.

All those ratings are max, and the induction hob worked really well, and pulsed from 900w to 1.7kw during cooking pasta sauce once it got up to temperature, for example. It was only £35 from some dodgy chinese make, which has an advisory on it from our regulator about fusing problems, but we use it outside and there's various fuses between it and the battery, so we should be ok :/

I really wanted to get DC equipment so I wouldn't need to use an inverter, but finding any is difficult. The best DC kettle I have found is only 1L and 24v with a "din" connector, and I haven't had chance to try and set that up with a DC-DC converter yet. A friend of mine modified a little oven like we have to work off ~42v DC, which worked, but I don't know how he did it :( I did buy a 48v immersion heating element, which I wanted to use to heat water for washing up etc, but I've not tried that yet either :(

There are various DC fridges you can get for camping, but we don't use them on the system .

Hope that helps!

It's just started getting warm and sunny here, so we will start using the system again when I am working outside. We have only used it once this year so far.

There's also plasma hobs coming out from China, which look interesting, and might behave more like cooking on gas. I would like to try one sometime, but they aren't very common yet.