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?

  • Da Oeuf@slrpnk.netOP
    2·
    3 months ago

    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…

    • Chewie@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      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.