More on Electric Cooking

Those Barbie Sized Appliances

I’ve been exercising my EcoFlow River 2 battery inverter unit to become familiar with what it can do and what it cannot. Here are some useful outcomes.

Takes about 9% of battery capacity to heat up 1/2 of this large can of heavy soup on a 250W hotplate. So 18% for a full lunch that will put you into siesta.

In my article on grinding wheat to make bread, at the end I lamented that I didn’t have anything that could reach baking temperatures so I had to use the full-size kitchen oven. That challenge has been solved, behold!

Mainstays, indeed

Walmart sells a $20 toaster oven that will go up to 450° – and it works with the EcoFlow. Let me explain. This mini oven has two heating elements and three settings: only the bottom element on (550W), only the top element on (550W) or both on (1,100W) but with temperature control. The latter is what I was after for baking since it maintains temperature but the power demand is over 2X what the EcoFlow will deliver at 500W. I thought that a problem.

My first solution was to use an external lighting dimmer, like in the wall of your house, to knock down the 1,100W demand to what the EcoFlow could provide. But in living a life always on the edge, I just plugged it in to see what would happen and… the EcoFlow self-limited the power delivery to its maximum! Problem solved by the engineers who already took this into account, likely as a self protection measure.

Above, the system has delivered its first batch of instant biscuits (375°)and the EcoFlow is down to 54% to heat up and bake for 15 minutes. The second batch took the unit down to 26% so that is probably the safe limit of depletion outside of disabling all the emergency alarms.

So now we have a fully off-grid solution from wheat berries to biscuits, rechargeable via solar. Sure you have to add some butter and such but all the really hard stuff after you have ingredients can be sun repowered.

Two final notes:

1. I tested with an industrial thermometer and indeed, that toaster got up to 450°

2. Out of the box you need to plug the toaster in and let it burn off all oils from the stamping and fabrication process. I am sure it states that in the instructions but since nobody ever reads those darn things, I’ve repeated it here.