Frugal Cruising Idea Exchange

[Don C L]

I'm not baking these days but I have made muffins in the past in the Omnia Oven... seems pretty frugal...
also this thread may have some useful things...
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...al-153058.html

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Solar cookers are possibly viable in southern/sunny areas. Not so where I cruise.

You have zero sunny days? My parabolic solar furnace is as powerful as an alcohol stove whenever the sun is shining. It concentrates 6sq ft down to 1sq inch using mirrors from the dollar store. It gets hotter than a flame in the focal point.

I make charcoal and pitch, it can cook all day, and after 30 minutes I cooked all my food.

Electric is probably ok for heating things, crock-style, but if cooking is more than just a utilitarian task, I can’t see this being very good.

It is actually very useful, easy to use, and simple, but I don't recommend it being the only way to cook things as it relies on electrical generation.

None of the cooking fuels are expensive,

expensive is relative. In fact, cooking fuel would be very expensive for me, since I don't buy any fuel for anything.

and most stoves/ovens are very efficient.

This is false. Sorry but just about every stove or oven I have seen in a boat is exceptionally inefficient. The most efficient way to cook:

1) The flame should never touch the pot. Most efficient way must have a large distance so that the air that touches the pot is just warmer than the pot itself. This requires a large amount of space for a small flame far below. Virtually no stoves on boats (or even house) come close to this.
2) The heat should be insulated on all sides to ensure virtually all the heat goes into the food, but and none is wasted. The incomming air (before combustion) can be pre-heated by the exhaust air for added efficiency.
3) The stove needs to be made of a high quality insulation or ceramic so that it cannot radiate heat, and has little thermal capacity itself.


Basically, no stoves in boats do any of these things. If they did, your 4 month tank would last 4 years or more. There are practical reasons, but mostly people don't care about efficiency. People who do care about efficiency don't buy fuel.

Electric is the best bet
#1 is irrelevant for electric already as there is no flame
#2 it is easy to wrap insulation like a wool blanket around a slow cooker. This is how I can cook using 60 watts of electricity.
#3 is maybe possible using a vacuum insulated electric pressure cooker. This would be the ultimate way to cook using electricity.

We cook all the time on board, including baking bread, cookies, other meals. A 20# propane tank lasts us around four months. Diesel or kero would be ever better.

propane can blow you up, and diesel and kero both stink.

There is the hassle of filling these. I sure have sailed a lot of places where propane was not available. The local people all used wood and charcoal to cook. I see lots of people complaining that it cost more than $60 to fill one of these tanks! Now it's a hassle and expensive! No fuel is available so convenient as solar energy.

Using fuel to cook (besides possibly wood) is outside the scope of "frugal"

I’d love a wood stove cooker, but can’t see that work in my smallish boat.

Why? I cook with wood if it's rain or snow, I think my boat is smaller than yours.

My wood stove cooker/heater is very simple to build and can bake things. It is an empty gass bottle with 3 inch pipe stuck into it, and opening to load, with a tin can cut open to close the opening. The suction from the fire holds the door in place.

I also have outdoor wood cooker. I made it using lots of fiberglass mat (almost an inch thick) surrounding a stainless container. I use a small electric fan from a computer to blow air in. This keeps the fire relatively hot, and one handful of twigs can cook a meal this way.

When food is cooked, I pour water to save the charcoal. This means the next fire starts with charcoal which has little smoke, and can get hot before adding wood,so I save a lot of smoke.

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by stevegerber

You also mentioned generating cooking gas from poop, are you going to try making a small scale methane digester? Would adding fish guts and vegetable scraps to the digester help generate methane too?

What I am attempting to do will produce 3x more combustable gas, and only take a few sunny hours. This is by distillation at high temperature (600 celcius) not by anaerobic digestion.

Using bacteria has issues especially on a boat:
1) bacteria consume most of the energy, and only 30% ends as gas.
2) Must be a constant temperature of 35-55C which is very difficult on a small scale.
3) Must feed a constant rate to maintain stable bacteria population
4) It takes 6-8 weeks to digest, so the container needs to be fairly large. The smallest ones I have heard of are 50 gallons in tropical countries. Typically it should be about 250 gallons to be reasonably efficient.
5) it takes time to build up the bacteria population, so if there are any problems, it takes a while to restart.
6) The gas has hydrogen sulfide you might want to try to filter out since it is poisonous.

If you manage to make a biogas generator on your boat, let us know about it!

[BlackHeron]

A typical 20lb LP tank will supply well over 400,000 BTU to an LP stove on a boat. That's a lot of cooking for what is essentially a <$20 exchange or fill in most places.

[Snowpetrel]

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

You have zero sunny days? My parabolic solar furnace is as powerful as an alcohol stove whenever the sun is shining. It concentrates 6sq ft down to 1sq inch using mirrors from the dollar store. It gets hotter than a flame in the focal point.

I make charcoal and pitch, it can cook all day, and after 30 minutes I cooked all my food.

I'd love to see a pic of your solar cooking setup. Sounds pretty neat, and also a great way to heat water?

We used to do a lot of cooking and heating with the wood heater on my parents boat im winter. It really helped extend the gas bottle refill interval, and lots of hot water was availible for washing.

Those little rocket stoves look like a modern and very efficient way to cook with wood and twigs.

Nothing is more satisfying than cooking up a soup with wood you found on the beach!

Good insulation really saves money when in cold climates.

[stevegerber]

Great ideas, Boat_Alexandra! A vacuum insulated pressure cooker does sound like it would be very energy efficient. Might be a difficult DIY project, but an insulated pressure cooker would be doable. How about heating an insulated pressure cooker with your parabolic reflector? That would be fast efficient cooking!

Here's another brainstorm for efficient rainy day cooking. Use a vacuum tube (like the GoSun uses) but make a frame to hold it vertically. Make an insulated cap for the open end and feed a power wire through a hole in the lid to power an electric imersion heating element in water. Should be a pretty efficient way to cook a soup. Might even be possible to just heat the water and then remove the element, add your soup ingredients, put the insulated cap on and let it slow cook using the residual heat in the water. Actually you could also do this with a stainless steel vacuum bottle which would be cheaper than a glass vacuum tube.

[belizesailor]

Originally Posted by stevegerber

>> They dont take up much space, you
>> could keep your own small herd (?) of cuy
>> aboard for cheap food

They're herbivores right? You could fatten them on seaweed, no?

Maybe so...they feed them barley in Peru....damn, could be beer instead!

[thinwater]

Originally Posted by stevegerber

I don't know thinwater, "retained rats", might be a little extreme even for a diehard frugalist like me... I would give roast guinea pig a try if I was in Peru!

I won't live that down for a while....

[BlackHeron]

At <$20 exchange or fill in most places for 400,000 BTU of LP that is 48 hours straight cooking on my Force-10 stove's largest burner on Max: 8500btu/hr. That's like $0.40/hr at the highest heat level and in reality you'd probably only need about 1/4-1/2 of that so about $0.15 to around $0.20/hour, maybe less. I can exchange a tank here in high-priced Chicago for about $17.50 so my numbers are pretty conservative and could be even cheaper.

[partingclouds]

Sailorchic34,

You are my hero. Uh, I mean heroine Less is more...


Partingclouds

[Mike OReilly]

We’ve talked cooking. How about food acquisition? And food preservation? How much do you produce, catch or scavenge?

Food costs are probably one of our largest ongoing budget items. I’m still living in first-world Canada, so costs are not cheap, but we do ok. I’ve always been into dehydrating, so whenever there’s cheap access to good veg/fruit I try and buy in bulk, then dry and vacuum bag for later use. I built a solar dehydrator, and hope to put it to the test this coming season.

How much fishing do you do? Do you harvest local wild foods? How about growing food on board?

I must admit, I’m a terrible fisher, but I hope to do better while cruising Newfoundland. My local harvesting has been limited to berries and now mushrooms (these were actually picked by fellow boaters who know their fungi). On board we grow herbs and sprouts.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by thinwater

I won't live that down for a while....

And I would not be too confident regarding acceptance of a lot of folks of your future dinner invitations.

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by BlackHeron

At <$20 exchange or fill

0) $20 is still a lot of money.
1) You are not considering your time and effort of going to refil the bottle. Try carrying a full one more than a few miles.
2) I have been to countries where cruisers had to pay more than $60 to fill because of taxi ride.
3) Incompatible between countries. I remember my friend in NZ, they refused to fill a US bottle. Maybe because they want to make more money, but they claim "regulations" Europe, also has different bottles, valves, and certifications. So you need a new bottle everytime you change countries, or carry lots of these? Impractical.
4) Not always available. I have been months at a time in areas without gas. I would need several gas bottles and this is only one person! Where it was available (large cities) would have been a long mission and cost a lot to actually fill all those bottles.
5) I have been on boats when the gas runs out. Now they have no way to cook food! Instead sit around talking about getting gas "tomorrow" I can _always_ find wood anytime.
6) You are not considering the environmental cost of propane. Most of the energy is consumed extracting, refining, transporting, compressing the propane. A small percentage is in the actual fuel itself. You are guilty of using an inefficient wasteful method to cook food.
7) Danger.. Do we really need to describe all the boats that blow up?

I can conclude that propane makes about as much sense as using an inefficient inflatable dingy like 95% of cruisers use, or stainless steel standing rigging. It is expensive, inconvenient, impractical, inefficient and wasteful. The decision is based on ignorance and copying bad habits.

Why don't you just use solar oven, and wood fire? The only disadvantage is the smoke, but now I cook the wood in the solar oven first and make charcoal, so makes little smoke. Soon I'm going to make cooking gas from the poop using the solar oven, but I have a few hurdles to jump.

[FlyingScot]

To be fair you can't consider the time for getting a propane tank refilled without considering the time it takes to gather wood and make charcoal. How long does it take to start cooking when you are ready? Propane, almost instantly.

Seems alochol stoves have a good place on boats. Not sure why everything switched to propane.

-Chris

[Mike OReilly]

My previous boat had an old pressure alcohol stove/oven. The stove part worked great. Used it for years with no problems. The oven was poorly designed and inefficient (unlike my current oven, which is magnitudes more efficient), so took a huge amount of fuel to bake anything. But the stove was great.

People are paranoid about pressure alcohol, much like some are about propane. Caution is always warranted around any fuel, but it is simply not true (based on actual data) that many boats "blow up" due to propane, or alcohol, each year. At least not in the USA. Maybe they’re blowing up at much higher rates elsewhere.

I like alcohol as a fuel for its safety, simplicity and accessibility. The major downside is energy density and cost. Alcohol is something like 1/2 as energy dense compared to propane, and even worse compared to kero or diesel. It beats wood, but it takes a lot of volume to match the BTUs of one 20# propane cylinder.

Alcohol is still alive and well. The new non-pressure alcohol stoves/ovens from Origo look really good to me. But there are pressure and non-pressure stoves out there on the used market.