Cooking Apparatus on Boats

My stove is induction,though don't use it all that much-the main BBQ has a side burner which I use for almost all the pot cooking.

If you want to boil water,forget the pot and stove just have a hot water immersion kettle-can have a litre+ boiled in about 90 seconds.

 

Lowest cost to purchase and operate for a single burner is always a PRIMUS kerosene burner.

Yes it does require a pre heat time ,( 30-45 seconds) but it is almost 10,000 BTU , of course no electric and 5 Gal of kerosene will usually last over a YEAR!

Best installed double gymboled , if you prepare hot food in F-8 or worse.

 

Depends of your battery, a bank of 880Ah should run it hours after hours. Thou frying a portion of salmon and vegs takes me on a 1500w plate about 5min full power and 4 more 1/2 power, making less than 2Ah and that's with conventional plate. Induction should save some. Anyway that makes about 400 portions of salmon with weggies discharging 50% of the bank.
BR Teddy

 

I wasn't questioning your power figure, but rather the amp figure in light of what was reported by the other gentleman with a 2 burner unit on his Pilgrim trawler. I have since found out that he has not been using it from an inverter, but rather shore power and his generator. So that would account for the significantly lower amp usage.
http://www.trawlerforum.com/forums/showpost.php?p=199200&postcount=19

So i'll have to do a little more research when I get some more time.

 

The FAQ is a bit misleading for boat use if you read it quickly as it states that the voltage is 120V below the wattage figures. So if running from a 12V battery bank, multiply the amps by 10, hence the 80A figure.

Now if the inverter is sized correctly and the cables, battery bank size also correct to feed the inverter, given the quoted time by Teddy to cook, it may well be feasible for stuff that doesn't take long. Personally I'd prefer LPG if I wanted 'instant on' heat followed by kerosene if I wanted to minimise risk and could wait a bit longer to fire up the cooker (preheat time).

Turning fossil fuel into heat to run an engine then mechanical energy into electricity to feed a battery bank then back into heat to cook food strikes me as highly inefficient - the losses at each step *have* to stack up substantially. Personally I do *not* want to run my main engine just to charge batteries, it's expensive and inefficient. In fact I'm planning on having a little 2 KVa inverter generator running off of ULP to do stuff when I'm not running the main engine for propulsion. They're quiet, can live in a deck box and basically, are consumable items.

One of the hassles with the Primus type kerosene cookers seems to be getting spare parts. Some are available on Ebay but they seem to mainly be new old stock which isn't good for the longer term. I have a couple spare burner units but I keep my eye out for more.

PDW