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?
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?
We have a small flight case on wheels that we use as an outside kitchen with the following appliances:
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.
Yes, that helps a lot - thank you!
When you say you don’t recommend cooking on 24v, do you mean with appliances which have 24v DC power supplies, or does that include AC appliances powered by an inverter on a 24v system? Our existing system is 24v, so it’s tempting to stay on that and not have to change anything with the lighting and other DC stuff we have.
I’ve tried pretty hard to stick to DC equipment too, but have decided to make more exceptions from now on as it is very restrictive for a lot of things. In fact I just got a small insulated stainless AC electric kettle and I’m absolutely in love with it.
Very interested in using LiFePO4 for the batteries as well…
Sorry for the delay. I’ve not been on slrpnk for a while as all their CSS was messed up for me and it was difficult to read anything :( It seems to be fixed now. Maybe my browser caches have timed out or something.
I mean that the cables from the DC system to the inverter will have to be thick if you want to power high-wattage devices. For example, we want to use an electric (AC, sadly) water heater in a camper van we are renovating, and to power the inverter, we have been told that on the 12V system, the cables between the battery and inverter should be maximum 1m long, and each one will be about 1cm thick! For 24V, the cables will probably be half the diameter, and you can probably run them longer, but it could still be quite restrictive.
I wish I could find 24V DC things, at least I would only need a DC-DC converter and not an inverter, but as mentioned, i’ve only found a kettle, fans and fridges that work at 24V :(
Still, if you’ve already got a lot of 24V stuff, it may be too much hassle to change to 48V (although DC-DC converters could be used, but that’s yet more things you would have to buy).
I started at 12V, but only because I was new at it all, there’s a lot of 12V stuff around, and knew at some point I would probably have to change to 48V for a “serious” system. I managed to get a lot of smaller DC-DC converters (eg for USB, lights or 12V things) that would work at 48V too when I made the change a few years later.