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In my previous blog post I hypothesized that multi-cookers, equivalent to Instant Pots, had been probably the most environment friendly methodology of cooking accessible for a house. In this text, I’ll run by way of one experiment that helps that speculation.
I cooked 1 cup of white rice in my multi-cooker, a Zavor LUX LCD 8-QT, and measured the electrical energy consumption over the whole course of utilizing a kill-a-watt meter. I then cooked the identical quantity of rice on our fuel range and timed every step of the method to estimate the pure fuel consumption.
Multi-cooker – 113 Wh
I adopted the guide for cooking lengthy grained white rice, which says so as to add 1.5 cups water and cook dinner on excessive stress for 10 minutes. The instantaneous pot took a couple of minutes to come back as much as temperature and stress. I measured the height wattage which was 1,257W. Since the Zavor LUX LCD 8-qt is rated at 1,300W that measurement is sensible. During a lot of the 10 minutes of stress cooking, the moment pot measured solely 1W as a result of the cooking vessel is nicely insulated and didn’t lose a lot warmth or stress through the course of. Through different measurements, I do know LCD show consumes about 1W. The means of cooking the rice took 113 Wh (watt-hr) with the Instant Pot.
Gas vary – 978.5 BTUs
I adopted my tried and true recipe for cooking rice on the range: add 2 cups of water for each cup of rice, deliver to a boil after which simmer for quarter-hour lined.
The 1 cup of rice and a couple of cups of water took 4 minutes 41 seconds to come back to a boil. I turned it right down to a simmer for quarter-hour with the lid on the pot. The key to cooking rice on the range is to not test on the rice in whereas it’s cooking. When quarter-hour is finished, if I’ve time, I flip off the fuel and let it sit one other 5 minutes simply to make certain. I didn’t run the exhaust vent fan like I ought to, which might have made the vitality consumed general even increased for the fuel vary.
Estimating BTUs
My range is a straightforward outdated Kenmore vary/oven and the 4 burners are all rated at 9,500 BTUs/hr. At full energy bringing the rice and water to a boil, I consumed 741 BTUs of pure fuel. For simmering, I’m going to estimate that it’s utilizing 10% of full energy, so 950 BTUs/hr. I’ve discovered simmer settings for varied fancy ranges to be in that vary. Simmering the rice used one other 237.5 BTUs. Combining the 2 steps collectively, cooking rice on a fuel vary consumed 978.5 BTUs.
0.078 hr * 9500 BTUs/hr + 0.25 hr * 950 BTUs/hr = 741 BTUs + 237.5 BTUs = 978.5 BTUs
Comparison – Instant Pot vs Gas Stovetop for 1 cup rice
To convert from BTUs to Wh we divide by 3.41214.
| BTUs | Wh | Power Plant Efficiency 64% (Wh) | |
| Instant Pot | – | 113 | 176.6 |
| Gas range | 980 | 287 | 287 |
Because we get all of our electrical energy from photo voltaic and renewable vitality, we don’t endure the era lack of changing from fossil gasoline to electrical energy on the energy plant. Our multi-cooker makes use of 40% of the vitality to cook dinner rice as utilizing the fuel vary. Even if we obtained most of our electrical energy from trendy mixed cycle pure fuel energy crops like most of New England, the multi-cooker remains to be over 38% extra environment friendly than the fuel cooktop.
The subsequent time you are attempting to determine whether or not to cook dinner one thing on the range or in your multi-cooker, contemplate that the multi-cooker is considerably extra environment friendly and won’t produce dangerous combustion gasses in your house. Another bonus is that it’s normally sooner too.
Happy Greening!
Jon
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