Is the gimbled propane oven obsolete?

[noelex 77]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

How big is your inverter?

We have a Mastervolt 2.5 KW inverter.

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

We have a Mastervolt 2.5 KW inverter.

See, we are talking different things. You can pull your bank below 12.0V with a 2.5kW inverter, I can’t pull it under 13.5V with a 6kW inverter.

Running an induction cooktop isn’t an electric galley in my view. Running a convection oven and an induction cooktop while also brewing coffee, all simultaneously, is my definition of an all electric galley, 5kW minimum. This can be done easily with 10kWh LFP, which would translate to 800Ah at 12V.

[noelex 77]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

Running an induction cooktop isn’t an electric galley in my view. Running a convection oven and an induction cooktop while also brewing coffee, all simultaneously, is my definition of an all electric galley, 5kW minimum. This can be done easily with 10kWh LFP, which would translate to 800Ah at 12V.

That would be nice, but cruising boats can easily become too complex for little practical gain. I think you are overestimating the "essential" requirements.

My wife is a keen cook and makes meals from scratch including bread, pizza, preserves, etc. We have not gone hungry so far .

The thread link below indicates that most cruisers report usually conducting electrical cooking at modest rather than full power levels. Members with less than 5-6 Kw of inverter capacity should not be discouraged from electric cooking in my view. In areas of reasonable solar insolation we routinely use all electric cooking and electric heating of shower water on an inverter of half this size.

https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...-276684-6.html

[rslifkin]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

See, we are talking different things. You can pull your bank below 12.0V with a 2.5kW inverter, I can’t pull it under 13.5V with a 6kW inverter.

Running an induction cooktop isn’t an electric galley in my view. Running a convection oven and an induction cooktop while also brewing coffee, all simultaneously, is my definition of an all electric galley, 5kW minimum. This can be done easily with 10kWh LFP, which would translate to 800Ah at 12V.

Some of us are limited in how many things we do at the same time in the galley by space. If I'm using the stove, I'm probably not making coffee (normally the coffee maker sits on the stove when in use). And there's also the bail-out option if needing a ton of power at once: just fire up the generator for a few minutes (which we end up doing for cooking and hot water anyway, as until I add a hard top over the helm area, we can't fit enough solar to meet 100% of our needs).

[sv_isara]

In our journey down the coast (end of ep 13) we used the gimbal function of the stovetop daily. With crew, I think it would be much more likely since cooking is much simpler when you have that crew support.

Therefore, when I created my induction and electric stove, I kept the gimballing function since it helped us greatly on long passages.

At anchor, so far I haven't needed it, but could see using it.

As for the electric galley comments, less fuel types is a good thing. Plus solar energy is free. My marina electric bill is $80/month (thank you safeharbor), so they gave me a real cost argument as well. I'll make that back in maybe 24 months, including the solar arch etc (since i built it myself)

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

That would be nice, but cruising boats can easily become too complex for little practical gain. I think you are overestimating the "essential" requirements.

My wife is a keen cook and makes meals from scratch including bread, pizza, preserves, etc. We have not gone hungry so far .

The thread link below indicates that most cruisers report usually conducting electrical cooking at modest rather than full power levels. Members with less than 5-6 Kw of inverter capacity should not be discouraged from electric cooking in my view. In areas of reasonable solar insolation we routinely use all electric cooking and electric heating of shower water on an inverter of half this size.

https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...-276684-6.html

“Essential requirements”… yeah but for us, living aboard is about making it as hard as possible, trying to see how bad it can be and still survive. We’re baby boomers, we want luxury because we worked hard to have earned it and I want to run the oven and the cooktop simultaneously and have coffee too.

I mean on propane everyone does run the oven and cooktop at the same time, but once it becomes electric now suddenly we must endure more hardship and only run one or the other? Isn’t that something for psychology class?

Originally Posted by rslifkin

Some of us are limited in how many things we do at the same time in the galley by space. If I'm using the stove, I'm probably not making coffee (normally the coffee maker sits on the stove when in use). And there's also the bail-out option if needing a ton of power at once: just fire up the generator for a few minutes (which we end up doing for cooking and hot water anyway, as until I add a hard top over the helm area, we can't fit enough solar to meet 100% of our needs).

Yes, the genset. But that genset runs on fossil fuels that you can’t produce aboard, right?

[Pete7]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

I want to run the oven and the cooktop simultaneously and have coffee too.

I mean on propane everyone does run the oven and cooktop at the same time, but once it becomes electric now suddenly we must endure more hardship and only run one or the other? Isn’t that something for psychology class?

We can roast a duck and use the induction hob for veg at the same time, all on a 2kW inverter, or use the toaster and boil the kettle etc. The trick is to select appliances which are efficient, rather than say in the past using gas boiling more water than is really needed. We have discussed induction hobs before, but I maintain whilst 2000w might be nice, in practice I found 600-800w is the best sort of settings to avoid boiling a pan over or burning the contents. Pasta will simmer at 200w quite happily if the pan has a lid. After all, on gas you would turn the heat down once up to temperature to simmer. The nice thing about induction is the time it takes to bring a pan up to temperature. As I am sure you will agree, its astonishingly quick and still catches us out, because the energy is going directly into the pan, not loosing half heating the interior of the yacht.

The only thing we haven't done is gimbal the Remoska, because I don't see us using it coastal sailing. However, it could be done if we needed. Instead the induction hob and toastie maker are used. The induction hob is gimballed, the toastie maker and kettle will stay on a galley top quite happily even going to windward.

Pete

[Fuss]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

Jedi, as you correctly point out, having enough solar power is the key if you want to indulge in electric cooking.

However, for those with lead acid batteries there is nothing to stop you using electric cooking providing you have a well designed electrical system, with a reasonable sized battery bank.

I had one of the first all electric galleys is 2012. Induction 2 x cooktop, combination microwave, grill and fan oven, electric kettle, 1.6kwh 2v cells , 400w solar, 6kw alternators, 3.6kw battery chargers, 6kw generator (V seldom used)
Yes there was some voltage drop but this was managable as we are not always cooking at full power... except for the kettle, but that's only 2 mins.
Best batteries in the world, 2v forktruck batteries, why would anyone have anything else ....you can abuse them like no other, if you don't believe me ask a forktruck driver what he knows about battery care.
No other batteries compare.... of course back in those days, I got a lot of stick from the forum.... gas is the only way to go, its so convenient and not dangerous at all. This thought changed alot with Lifepo4

I charged my batteries with all the amps I could give them 6kw.... and equalised them at 32v..
.. some went on about how damaging this all was .... not dissimilar to what I get now for using eve280 cells to start my 6l engine.



And with all this abuse from me, the batteries lasted 16 years.


I then had 14.5kwh Lifepo4, currently upgraded to 22kwh (24v) by putting the eve 280 start battery in series with another. ... Of course I'm going to get more stick for this tapping of 12v to run and start the 12v engine but its the sensible thing to do with Lifepo4 as it provide redundancy of spare cells for emergencies...unless you want some spare cells sitting in the cupboard ....you do have spare lifepo4 cells of course, don't you!



The system was so balanced that I never looked at the battery monitor daily, maybe once a week.



You have an engine so you want it to give all it can in alternator charging balanced against the solar, you don't want it covered everywhere in solar panels with a little alternator doing nothing much and you don't want to go overboard with the alternator charging and have too little solar. For me, I could have done with 800w-1000w instead of 400w solar. This way, I would have the big alternator backup if we had 2weeks cloudy.

[Fuss]

I forgot to mention, 2 multipluses in series, one takes the output from the first 2.5kw one and then adds to it making 5kw roughly. They can't be parallelled as both are different models/software releases but in series works fine.

[rslifkin]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

Yes, the genset. But that genset runs on fossil fuels that you can’t produce aboard, right?

True, and as we make other changes to the boat that will give room for more solar (and add more battery capacity as well), that will reduce our generator runtime further. Even now, our generator runtime is pretty low (average is under 1hr / day when away from shore power), so considering we're on a powerboat, generator fuel consumption is a rounding error relative to fuel burned moving the boat around.

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by rslifkin

True, and as we make other changes to the boat that will give room for more solar (and add more battery capacity as well), that will reduce our generator runtime further. Even now, our generator runtime is pretty low (average is under 1hr / day when away from shore power), so considering we're on a powerboat, generator fuel consumption is a rounding error relative to fuel burned moving the boat around.

Ah powerboat, I had missed that. I totally don’t know what to do with a powerboat, it feels wrong to add solar unless it’s electric drive too…

[rslifkin]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

Ah powerboat, I had missed that. I totally don’t know what to do with a powerboat, it feels wrong to add solar unless it’s electric drive too…

Even with having to burn fuel for propulsion, solar has been pretty much a game changer. Unless we have really crappy weather and correspondingly poor solar output, I never end up running the generator to charge batteries, only when I need a bunch of power at once (which is generally once a day to cook dinner and let the water heater re-heat, as the solar and batteries can cover the rest of our needs). The engines produce power when running, but that only applies when we're moving. If we stay in the same place for a few days it's no different than a sailboat from a power perspective, except my engines are bigger, burn more fuel at idle, etc. and you'd never want to run them just for battery charging.

That reduction in time spent listening to the generator is great (ours is quiet from outside save for water splashing out of the exhaust, but isn't in a sound shield so it's a little noisy inside). And less usage means less maintenance as well, plus we're not as reliant on the generator, so a failure while away from shore power is much less of a problem. I've pegged the cost of power from the generator at somewhere around $1 / kwh (fuel + maintenance), so it's not like running the thing is free.

From the battery charging perspective, solar is just incredibly convenient. Power pretty much "just happens" without having to do much of anything or really think about it. It's good enough that if we're docking somewhere that running the generator for an hour isn't a big deal, we often don't bother dragging out the big, heavy shore power cords unless it's hot enough to need A/C for sleeping or we're staying for more than a night or 2.

Currently we've got 820w of solar (and with almost no shading concerns from stuff on the boat), which is about all we can fit (the current bimini structure isn't suitable for mounting panels). The bimini is slated to be replaced with a hard top at some point though, which will easily support a couple more panels. My goal is to get close to 2kw of solar, which would be enough to support most to all of our cooking and also allow us to run the water heater on solar most of the time. So generator use would become a lot more infrequent, pretty much just to make up for multiple poor solar days in a row, or when we're doing something really power intensive, or if the weather gets so unbearable that we need to run the A/C for a bit without shore power.

[noelex 77]

Originally Posted by s/v Jedi

We’re baby boomers, we want luxury because we worked hard to have earned it and I want to run the oven and the cooktop simultaneously and have coffee too.

Always keep in mind that "luxury" includes the important ability to enjoy the places we visit rather than spending time fixing things or waiting for repairs or spare parts. Free time is one of the greatest luxuries of all.

If it is important to you to be able to operate the coffee machine, oven and cooktop on high power simultaneously, by all means install the hardware necessary to do this, but realise that the added equipment and complexity does have a downside. It is not always wise to make your boat like your home, just because it is possible.

When setting up cooking equipment for a long distance cruising boat, I would encourage people to aim for redundancy rather than be too concerned about operating multiple pieces of equipment simultaneously. The ability to use propane, diesel or electricity to cook food provides versatility to cope with different conditions such as locations or seasons with poor solar insolation. Importantly, failure of one system does not mean cutting your cruising plans short to affect repairs.

[s/v Jedi]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

Always keep in mind that "luxury" includes the important ability to enjoy the places we visit rather than spending time fixing things or waiting for repairs or spare parts. Free time is one of the greatest luxuries of all.

If it is important to you to be able to operate the coffee machine, oven and cooktop on high power simultaneously, by all means install the hardware necessary to do this, but realise that the added equipment and complexity does have a downside. It is not always wise to make your boat like your home, just because it is possible.

When setting up cooking equipment for a long distance cruising boat, I would encourage people to aim for redundancy rather than be too concerned about operating multiple pieces of equipment simultaneously. The ability to use propane, diesel or electricity to cook food provides versatility to cope with different conditions such as locations or seasons with poor solar insolation. Importantly, failure of one system does not mean cutting your cruising plans short to affect repairs.

You really do not understand me:

- my boat has been my home since 2002
- operating an oven and cooktop simultaneously is not considered a luxury, not even by the poorest families in the 1stworld
- redundancy means you have a backup. Having two inverter-chargers in parallel, what I do, means I have redundancy asI could run with just one. Your setup has only one,so you have no redundancy; when it fails you are out of cooking options.
Probably (an assumption) same goes for your battery. I actually have everything redundant.
- I have never had to wait for repairs. I have never had to hire someone for repairs.
- Boiling water in a kettle is always done at maximum power. The only reason to use a lower setting is that you don’t have enough power.

I don’t understand how you can have everything backwards?

[Pete7]

We carry a spare 1600w PSW inverter just in case. We also retained one 1.8L butane cylinder and have a single gas hob which could be fitted in 20 minutes if really needed.

Pete