"I Love Cooking With an Instant Pot in a Van on Solar!"

so it's very versatile and in ways that I would never even considered a possibility if you make a big pot of it and you have the free refrigerator and then you can eat on it for a week yeah then that works really well that's the most economical and healthiest usually way to eat [Music] hi everyone welcome back to my next video today I'm here with my new good friend Brad hello and Brad is also the videographer now for the channel and the primary video editor so Brad is on board welcome aboard Brent thank you feels great to be here and Brad is in a band just just like I am eesof and Weller and he does quite a bit of cooking and so he does cooking in an instant and a lot of people have asked us about the insta Pot and so I wouldn't I just like to interview Brad and see what he has to say is it practical what kind of foods can you cook with it what kind of power needs do you have so Brad how long have you had your insta pot sure that's a great question so I've had the instant pot about a year and I've been on the road for about a year and a half now and I started out with propane with a propane tank and a double burner cook stove and I got this about six months into my trip and and so I've been using this for about a year now and do you still use your propane I don't I don't in fact since I bought this I haven't used the propane I've been able to actually replace everything I was doing with my propane stove with this instant pot and so I like it a lot and one of the reasons I really like the instant pot is I don't find myself to be an exceptional cook and so with the instant pot there's a wide room for error and I think the key is because you're adding water and it's a kind of a pressure cook system you don't have to worry about scorching things or burning things everything just comes out pretty easy and I like that okay and so something I make is grilled cheese sandwiches can I make a grilled cheese sandwich in it so yes you could you could you could okay yes and so the way the instant pot works there's two ways you can use it you can use it with the lid closed and this is going to be your pressure cooking so you can cook soups and stews and you can cook meats to tenderize them but the other way that you can cook it is if you take the lid off and it has just a pan inside a stainless steel pot inside and then it has a little a rest you can set things on top of but whenever I cook meats what you do first is you brown the meats in the instant pot so it has a saute feature which basically just heats the bottom like a traditional stovetop so could you do a grilled cheese yes the only catch is you would have to dig it out of this pot the depth of it down there is gonna make turning it it would be a little bit of a challenge so yeah for a grilled cheese you would probably want a traditional type of a pot or pan and then also for like a large steak or something you know that would probably be better on on a pan as well right on a propane but this does have the ability so like whenever I cook like for example a stew I put the meat in here first and I Brown it so you just pour the meat in put in like 1/3 a cup of water and just stir it and it Browns up the meat and then from there you can add your ingredients in and complete it so really where this excels is as one pot meals yeah that's what it does really well but well you did boil eggs yep or you could well like beans being this will be perfect for being I've made rice in this and beans and then yeah you anything you need to boil so I've used just boiled water for hot coffee or hot chocolate and so you make your coffee and it every morning just by boiling water every morning every morning yeah and it's nice because you just wake up and you just put in the water and and hit the power button and you know you don't have to like the propane or any of that kind of business yeah carrying propane is kind of a pain but you know most of the things I kind of like like a grilled cheese I love a good grilled cheese and so often and I fry up hamburgers on a pan on my burner so but everything else I think you could do and you're just so if you want to just throw a can of chili in there you good absolutely yeah any kind of soup and that's the reason I like it is just because it's so easy you kind of just throw whatever you want in and you cook it so and then what I do is I make a big batch so if I make a soup or a stew I fill it up and then I'll eat off that for you know four days right and so you have refrigeration then I do yeah I do what are you using a 12-volt compressor or ice yes yeah it's the Dometic CRX 50 and that's a 12-volt compressor and it's a traditional upright not the not the cooler style or the chest style it opens like a traditional fridge right and so what I'll do after I cook is I'll put all my leftovers into a small like a Tupperware and then save it and then when you when I'm ready to reheat my leftovers you just put this piece down and then you just take a regular bowl put your leftovers in set it on top of this little trivet and then you put the lid on and you just turn it on and it just heats right up so now when you say bowl it couldn't be a plastic bowl no no so I have you could use like a ceramic bowl anything that's like microwave safe anything microwave safe yeah it's not plastic it's not plastic yeah so ceramic I use I have a stainless steel like an old camping bowl that I use and it comes out hot you know you don't want to just grab it but it works yeah so even for it works great for warming up leftovers I would that surprised me yeah that's something I would never you never considered and what's really nice is because it's it's heating them up with water in the bottom everything stays moist so you like your chickens your meats nothing dries out when you reheat it sometimes in a microwave you know you'll add water or you add a wet paper towel to add moisture but this one has the moisture built in so right everything comes out tasty right so you don't want to do you always have to have water in it yeah yeah yeah you always want something because otherwise you will scorch the bottom of the pan so you always want at least some kind of water in okay mm-hmm absolutely well that surprises me because I had thought that it would be mostly big pots but the fact that you could just do a small you know like put watch it right and it's chilly could just go into a small bowl yeah and the small bowl could go right in i heated up to molly's today for lunch so I had some tamales I bought down at the convenience store and I just put them in the bowl put a little water in the bottom and just steamed them real quick and they came out good oh wow yeah yeah yeah that my hadn't hadn't thought of it as that flexible I'm glad we're talking about it yeah they're things you probably never thought about it's a cool piece yeah and there's tons and tons of recipes oh yes yeah it came with a huge book and what I'll do when I want to make something new like I was trying to figure out some beef stew the other day so I'll just type in Google you know beef stew instant pot whatever you want to make is plus instant pot and the recipes will come up off the internet so there's just endless and listen I'm not tell you exactly how to do it what buttons what settings to use so if you want to eat cheaper and healthier this is the perfect tool yeah beans you know grains all those things this is the very best way to to cook them and so it essentially is a pressure cooker it is yeah it's using and that's really what makes it cook so quickly is the the pressure that it's building yep so it's very versatile and in ways that I would never even considered a possibility and as long as you have refrigeration it's really hard to buy for one person yeah all the single people out there know you go to the store and everything's in big packages and you don't want to mess with it because but if you make a big pot of it and you have the free refrigerator and then you can eat on it for a week yeah and that works really well that's the most economical and healthiest usually way to eat absolutely that's great yeah okay so one of the things people are going to need to know is how much power do they need you're running this off solar correct so how much solar does a person need to run this so I have a 200 I have 200 watts of solar to 100 watt panels and then I have a 200 amp power sealed lead-acid battery and so between those two items I can run the instant pot for you know really however much time I need most recipes don't call for more than five seven minutes they're pretty quick but what I have found though out what I will say is it works best if you can use it while you're in direct Sun it is a hungry appliance we calculated today it takes like 70 something amps 73 73 amps when it's running so it draws my battery down pretty far you know usually I'll see it like 11 8 11 9 if I'm not in direct Sun you know and so it it gets down there so you definitely want to be in direct Sun when you're using it if you can and what size of an inverter are you using so I'm using a 1000 watt pure sign and this is 800 watts is what this is rated at so it's kind of right there on the on the edge of what's acceptable right but there's not a motor so you don't have a big startup scratch which is a really good thing that's the hard part right yeah there's no surge so a thousand Watts runs it fine mm-hmm yeah runs it fine and yeah I had any issues with it one thing I will say is when I initially installed my inverter it's a really short run I only have about probably twelve inches between the inverter and the battery and I used four gauge cable wiring and it actually was too small of a gauge for this instant pot and it actually overheated and started to melt the insulation so I went up to a zero gauge wire bigboy and I haven't had any problems since and you do check it to see if it's hot I do check it occasionally to see if it's hot but definitely you know when you're getting into the big appliances you want to make sure the wiring is correct right I run a 2004 that I have a two odd yeah it is you know thumb size yeah you're the cabling is very very important yep now this is they come in different sizes and this is the one of the smaller sizes yes I believe this is three quarts and when I bought it it was the smallest one they made I know they have all different stuff now but this is a pretty good size even for two people you can still two people can eat out of this and you know for a couple days so but I bought it because I had a thousand watt inverter and I wanted to stay under that thousand right but the next size up I believe is like 1200 watts and then it goes up to like 15 and and so on so as long as your inverter is correct you could get a larger one right and the larger one if you do need a bigger one if you're having a family or if you want to cook for groups and some people I do want to cook for the group you'll need to get a bigger inverter and probably have more solar yeah definitely right right more solar you definitely couldn't run a bigger one on a thousand watt no definitely not and and are you using your pure sine inverter yes I am I'm using a pure sine that was something I definitely wanted to spend the money on when I bought the system I did buy the cheap charge controller it's just a PWM it's not a not a MPPT and so that's something that I'm considering I think I might upgrade my charge controller so I can get the most especially going into winter so I can get the most out of the hours of some that I have you'd get a good twenty to thirty percent more and in the winter that's really that sounds important to me yeah and so your inverter has worked real well for what brand of inverter are you using so the inverter brand of mine is power tech on power tech on and I've purchased it off Amazon I did quite a bit of research and for a thousand want pure sign it seemed to be the best value not the cheapest price I wanted a good one but it seemed to be the best value and it did come with a remote switch to turn it on and off because my inverter is mounted kind of down out of the way and so there's a separate switch I mounted up by my sink area that I can just hit that turns everything on and so this one I believe it was 300 it was in the 300s for the price that's what you're gonna pay for getting Berger yeah and I was thinking about one of the Zandt Rexha versions but they were more like in the $500 range and I just felt like I never usually buy the most expensive I try to find you know just something that's a little bit more affordable and so this was kind of like one down from the most expensive so I felt like it was a pretty good choice and I haven't had any issues with it yeah oh and it's really we mentioned turning turning it off and keeping it turned off Pierce big pure sine wave inverter 'z have a very large no load draw that's what it's called when the inverter is turned on and nothing's plugged in it's just on its consuming power and it's called the no load draw on your typical inverter is gonna be a quarter of an amp which doesn't really add up to that much but on a pure sine thousand watt it could be a half amp it could be three quarters it could be a full amp sure so if you leave it on all day you've burned 24 amps just doing absolutely nothing so it's really pretty important to keep it turned off yep and I only turn it on while I'm using it and then right away it goes back off saves a lot of power yeah it burnt so we actually put up my amp meter on it while it was running it was drawing seventy three amps an hour and that is a lot and so it's easy to think that that seventy three amps an hour is too much so for you have two hundred amp hours of battery you can only burn half you only have a hundred seventy three goes to the insta pot you don't have enough to play with but if that it's it is doesn't work that way it's actually amps per hour so it's seventy three amps per hour is seventy three amps but seventy three amps per minute you'd have to draw divided by sixty so I'm going to do that right now and we'll figure it out together so seventy three amps divided by sixty equals one point two amps a minute that's a really different story and if you only burn if you're only running it for ten minutes that's 12 amps which is pretty insignificant when you have a hundred amps to burn and most of us can afford death even if it's a really long cook at twenty minutes you're still when we had thirty two amps and you have a hundred to play with you're getting Sun coming in yeah and so you can afford to do it so the bottom line is like with my microwave it draws about two amps a minute and this thing is drawing about one in one and a half amp a minute so that's really pretty practical for most of us even with just 200 watts of solar and 200 amp hours of battery very practical the other thing that I think about is really this is the only appliance I have that draws a lot of amps I mean the only other thing I'm doing is running my max air fan my fridge is only a few amps and and powering my my my cell phone in my laptop so you know for me to give up a large portion of my power for this is really no problem and the bottom line is it works it works in fact we were talking about your usage and you rarely go below 12.5 12.5 I saw 12.5 for the first time today because we had a few days where the Sun was kind of iffy we had a lot of clouds and that was the first time I'd seen 12 v usually I don't go below 12 7 so the proof is in the pudding and if you're getting by with 200 watts then you know you're OK and you did it over the winter as well yeah when the when the Sun was a lot lower and that's with running you know everything else to the fridge and all the other devices so has been using this for a year and in that year he rarely goes below 12.5 and so 200 amps is plenty yeah I was worried when I started that 200 was just getting gonna be getting by but it turned out to be honestly just probably even more than I need there you go okay well thanks so much Brad absolutely sharing your experience with us the part that's very helpful for a lot of people folks I hope you got something out of this video and I know you did if you did would you please subscribe to the channel give us a like on YouTube hit that thumbs up button and we'll talk to you later [Music]

Channel: CheapRVliving

Views: 131,760

Rating: 4.954144 out of 5

Keywords: Instant Pot, Solar

Id: 4LfbWCUFTg0

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/brooddad2]

You are absolutely killing me 😀😂. I haven't caught up with all the other videos now there's a butt ton more. It's awesome to have this much info.😀✌️