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Hello Dave here with Solar Power Edge, welcome back
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This video is part of a DIY series about making 12-volt power cooking appliances in my solar workshop
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Here I will first introduce and demonstrate an early 12-volt cooktop or hot plate prototype
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If this kind of project interests you, please stay tuned. Please stay tuned. To encourage innovation, I often build prototypes of devices I think ought to exist
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It seems there is a shortage of good, affordable 12-volt cooking appliances on the market
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I think a 12-volt DC kitchen cooktop should be in every household. I ran into a lot of brick walls and struggles while building this cook-top, but the fact remains it does work and it can be done
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In this video, I'm going to show my first test of one of the cooktops I converted to run natively also 12-volt-d-c
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24 volts is also possible, but 12-volt is a much greater challenge
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So why do we need a 12 volts DC portable kitchen cooktop or hot plate
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Well, in one of my last videos, I did something pretty standard. I used a couple of 12-volt lithium-ane phosphate batteries, 100-watt solar panel
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small charge controller, DC-de-acinverter, and a small cooktop to cook some food
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This was a good demonstration of how even a small system can cook food quickly
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using normal kitchen appliances and without burning any fuel. But it lacks something important, efficiency and simplicity
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I'm always searching for ways to use solar power more effectively. Primarily, I want to eliminate my dependence on off-grid solar DC-inverters
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They are a complex piece of electronics, a common failure point, and they can waste a lot of power with cooking
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Repairing an inverter can be very hard or even impossible. High-tech prepping, high-tech survival and readiness means not being so dependent on technology to do basic household tasks
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Why not eliminate complexity and increase simplicity and reliability? And those desires for those qualities is what drove me to build a variety of what I call PV-to-load solar-powered appliances that can consume solar power
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directly without the need for a charge controller, a battery, or even an inverter
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However, cooking from a small portable 12-volt battery makes a lot of sense
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This is often difficult because the selection of 12-volt appliances seem to be very limited
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and that means using an inverter. I'm always looking for new 12-volt appliances, but often come up empty-handed
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Thus, one of the many projects I wanted to attempt was the total conversion of a standard
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kitchen cooktop or hot plate to run natively off of 12-volt-d-d-c. Today it was the first live test of my 12-volt-d-d-c kitchen cooktop or hot plate
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It isn complete yet and this is very early footage I found it very difficult to get this working My earliest attempts ran into a brick wall such as unexpectedly high temperatures inside the cooktop which was burning even fiberglass insulation I was using
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and emitting toxic smoke. There were also very fine dust particles and substances inside the cooktop
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that were very unsafe to breathe, requiring a breathing mask and an air filter for protection
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Another problem was the tempered glass, which is often glued using high-timp adhesive, and any attempts to pry it, it seemed futile
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However, I carried on with the project because I really believed that it should be be common, affordable, and available to everyone, and if I don't start somewhere and make some
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kind of a DIY prototype, maybe this product will never exist. 12-volt power can be found everywhere
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even in a car. With a 12-volt cooktop, cooking with a 12-volt battery would basically become
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child's play. This would allow anybody with a 12-volt battery to basically cook food, hang a 12-volt
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solar panel off of the battery, and you could cook all day probably for weeks without burning any fuel
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And I believe such a simple setup is exactly what the world needs, and probably will be needing
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it even more in the future. Okay, I recorded some footage in my workshop, basically cooking
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noodles directly off of a 12-volt battery with no inverter, and I'm going to go ahead and roll
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that footage now. Hi folks, Dave here
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This is a test of my prototype 12-volt cooktop, and yes, it is truly running on 12 volts
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this is not a trick or a gimmick. So I've got the wires here. I do not yet have proper connectors on them
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These are my 20-hour DR-prepared lithium-iron phosphate batteries. These are powering the cooktop through these wires, which are probably a little bit undersized
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for the application, but that's why. I had available so that's what I'm using. This is the first day I'm cooking food in it
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And just to be clear it is truly a 12-o cooktop. This was not an easy project. I will tell you that
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I will insert some clips of this cooktop running in a darker room. Right now I've got the
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pot on top. You can actually see that's on, but I assure you it's on. Yeah, you can see it a little
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bit. Yeah, it's a little bit blurry, unfortunately. And we're cooking some noodles. I'm not
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really a cook but yeah they cooking successful so far had a lot of trouble getting this to work actually had to rebuild it because of a breathing hazard It was putting out poisonous fumes It was burning So that was a problem
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But I got that sorted out. And this is kind of the first official cooking test
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I never actually put any food on it. I really believe that there should be 12-wheel cooktops on the store shelf
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I don't know why there isn't. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of availability if there are any
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I haven't seen any. They should be a very commonplace item. What I've done here is I've eliminated the inverter
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In my last test, you saw these batteries cooking food using an inverter and a cooktop
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But that requires a complicated and sophisticated circuit known as an inverter, DC-Dacie inverter
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It was always my dream to make things simple and robust and cheap and eliminate complexity, and that's what I'm doing here
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Going right in the bottom of the cooktop, and I don't want to move it because I need to use a proper
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cord clamp here. I've got a temporary cord clamp there and I don't want to pull in those wires or move it
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Plus this thing is very, very hot and I've already burned myself at least twice
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Anyway, it's working. See if I can do this without burning myself. It's working
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The first test with this cooktop was a little rough and I actually had to leave the room because it
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kind of was smoking really bad and I started to have a lot of pain in my head and sinuses so I had to leave
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I recovered from that, and I've rebuilt the stove again, and it seems to be working well now
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In solar power, the inverter seems to be the most ubiquitous and most common and heavily relied upon component
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And I think there are all to be native 12-volt appliances, 24-volt appliances, that you can just plug straight into the battery and cook with
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Why is it so complicated? Why does it need an inverter? Well, that's just the way things are
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Anyway, this is proof that it's absolutely possible to have a 12-volt cooktop to out
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absolutely cooked food on it. It does not need an inverter. It is not high voltage. It's just 12 volts DC
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going straight into my cooktop. Now granted, I had to completely rip this thing apart, and some of
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these cooktops are very, very hard to work on. In fact, some are impossible. It depends on how
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they're constructed. In addition to that, there's a breathing hazard. You have to wear a dust mask
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and use air protection because there's a lot of fine particulates that are inside these
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heating elements in these cook tops. Some of them, like I said, you can't really get them open
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it'll just crack this glass. Some of them you can get open and there's usually a fine powder inside
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which is very dangerous to breathe and that if you can even get the thing open Running at 12 volts is hard to cook food because you essentially working with a short circuit and that what inside this cooktop It pretty much a short circuit It not really much of an exaggeration at all It much easier to work with you know 120 volts AC is pretty
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easy, relatively speaking. Well, I'm kind of looking at the test here and, you know, this is really
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a small system. These batteries don't weigh much at all. This is my bacteria power or batterya power
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MPPT 12 volt charge controller and that's running off of a 100 watt panel which is on the outside of my solar workshop
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And yeah, I've just got an alligator clipped on the solar panels And which is in turn alligator clipped on with these batteries and
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It's charging away. I'm only getting 2.6 amps. That's far less than what the cooktop is drawing
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And this thing is a bit of a power hog, but it's cooking That part can't be argued. Yeah
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Just a quick plug for my solar heater. That's running straight off of solar panels
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And I'm using that to keep my workshop toasty warm. That's working pretty well
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So got some monster due to it, but it's serving me well at the moment. And it's just boiling away
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I think these noodles are just about done. I'm no expert, but I don't know
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I can't really tell. Like I said, I'm not a cook, but they've been in there maybe 10 minutes, and I'm just
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Probably we'll take them out in a few minutes. As of February 2024, this cooktop or hot plate is a work in progress and not quite ready for prime time
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I normally don't want to show anything until it's refined and safe, but reality has dictated otherwise
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There are so many projects in progress, including several 12-volt cooking appliances, yet time is so limited
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When things progress, I will upload my work in this series. I might also show the progress in my solar workshop vlogs from time to time
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If there is exceptional demand for it, I may later create a deep, detail DIY build guide for a 12 volts hot plate or cooktop. There is an extra insane level of work involved in such productions and much of the knowledge is just duplicates of what's already on my channel. Perhaps we will cross that bridge later or maybe these cooktops will suddenly appear on store shelves. Who knows? My channel is about using solar power in new and effective ways. If you like this kind of work please subscribe and stay tuned. Thanks for watching and see you later
