alt Hacker NewsThis is fun, I'm curious to try it.
An alternative that I experimented with and found to be very usable is one solar panel, a small camping battery ("portable power station"), and an Instant Pot. The total cost is not super high. The Instant Pot is power efficient and can cook a lot of food at once. Since it's battery powered you can start any time the battery is charged.
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buckle8017 • yesterday at 4:26 AM
There are now commercial ovens with LiFeO4 batteries in then that do basically just that.
Except they're stupid expensive.
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I had fun doing this over the summer with a 100W panel, a 1kWh battery (1500W max output), and various cooking appliances: rice cooker, hot water kettle, instant pot, induction cooktop. On a sunny Pacific Northwest day I could charge the battery around 50%, more if I rotated the panel diligently. Rice cooker and hot water kettle (5L) would use about 40-50% of it per usage. So during the summer it was handling all of my power needs for those two appliances. It was always fun getting to full charge and frantically finding novel ways to "not waste" the sunlight. Charging my power tool batteries, etc. One time I even charged my EV 1% but that wasn't very practical.
Some other interesting things I learned: the battery passively eats about 5-10W, and on a cloudy day the solar panel would only get 10W during the day. So in the cloudy PNW winters it can't even maintain the battery let alone charge it. The inverter eats another 30-50W or so, so you have to turn it off when you're not using the AC outlets. My battery lets me separately power AC and DC (USB-A and USB-C) so I was charging devices via USB and not wasting energy powering the inverter.