Comment by nwhitehead 2 days ago
This 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.
There are now commercial ovens with LiFeO4 batteries in then that do basically just that.
Except they're stupid expensive.
I don’t understand why people go this direction when propane-powered appliances are so much more appropriate. Much cheaper, readily available fuel, a few minutes to “reload” vs multiple hours to recharge the battery.
Similarly, I think there’s a niche market for a propane-powered espresso machine.
I can charge any battery powered appliances like that at home. Propane is only sold per bottle, not every petrol station has them(in fact - majority don't), you have to rent the bottle each time, the thing is stupidly heavy and has various restrictions on storage(can't park a car with it in an underground garage for instance, my insurance does not allow me to keep it inside my garage etc). Battery powered is just so much easier unless you're using it commercially and go through a lot of gas I guess.
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.