March 10, 2023
No, not that one.
This one…
(*All Electric Toasting and Coffee Water Heating)
There seems to be a big move to all electric galleys in boats. I’m not sure that idea really works for me. Electricity is an expensive and scarce commodity on a small boat. I suspect that many people that go to electric cooking end up running the engine and/or generator often to keep up with the electrical demands.
But we took a small step in that direction. Cyndi always wanted a toaster but I was Mr. No-That-Uses-Too-Much-Electricity. With our new lithium batteries (over a year old now, but still feels new to me), I thought what the heck. We could spare a few amp hours. So off to the discount warehouse we went to buy a $7.50 toaster (Australian Dollars).
This toaster is amazing! It’s better than any expensive toaster we’ve ever had, always producing golden brown, perfectly toasted toast. Now Cyndi calls me Mr. Toast. This worked out so well, we decided to take another step into the new millennium – an electric water kettle.
Propane is getting hard to find…
Probably 80 percent of the cooking gas we use (propane or LPG) is for heating water for coffee or tea. Propane is getting harder and harder to come by, with most gas filling stations in the South Pacific disappearing and the widespread adoption of exchange tanks instead. We can’t use the exchange tanks without major boat reworking as we have a horizontal tank on the cabin top. An electric kettle could save us so much aggravation.
Now that we have the electric kettle…
I don’t know how we lived without it. I fill the kettle before bed and plug it in. In the morning, I roll out of bed and turn on the inverter. Three minutes later, coffee water is ready. A couple of hours later, when Cyndi finally wakes up, I repeat the process for her coffee. Now she calls me Mr. Electric-Kettle.
Nerdy stuff follows…
The little travel-kettle we found uses 300 watts at 240 volts. Our 1000 watt inverter handles it easily. 300 watts at 13.2 volts is about 23 amps. It takes 3 minutes to heat water for a cup of coffee – 2 cups a day – that’s 2.3 amp-hours each day for coffee. We can afford that.
The toaster uses 750 watts at 240 volts. That’s about 57 amps. Toasting bread for 5 minutes a day is 4.7 amp-hours. Again, we can afford that.
Where I take exception with the electric galley concept is for stove top cooking and especially baking. Most electric ovens use about 2400 watts of electricity. Running the oven for 30 minutes to bake something uses 1200 watts of electricity (about 45 amp-hours at 12 volts). We have 500 watts of solar and it would take our panels about two and a half hours to replace that power – in full sunlight. Add 30 minutes of stove top cooking to that and now we’re getting close to our full day’s solar output, leaving nothing for charging computers or watching dumb movies (our favorite kind).
For me to feel comfortable with this power draw, I’d want double or even triple the solar and about three times the battery capacity (we now have 400 amp-hours at 12 volts or about 4800 watts). But what happens during a week of clouds? The engine or the generator would need to be switched into noise-making mode.
Nope, for us, I think this is as far as we’ll go into the electric galley world. Well, I guess we’d have a microwave but there’s a problem with that idea – absolutely no room for it! Wait, maybe I can find some space. Maybe Cyndi will be calling me Mr. Microwave in the future.
I’ll leave you with this appetizing photo…
-Rich
