First 6 months with no gas onboard

[Sea Change]

I think we are on the heavy side of power use for cooking. My wife has been making sour dough bread, cakes, and banana pancakes on a regular basis.
Now the oven isn't heating the whole boat up like it used to do with gas, she has got more into baking.
Cabin temperature is 28.5degC this afternoon without the oven on. We really don't need the additional heating

Likewise, SWMBO loves baking, and in places like the Bahamas we ate exclusively home baked bread due to cost. We also only ate out once, for lunch, in the two months we were there. We maybe eat out once or twice a month on average in the more affordable places (what's that about Scots being a bunch of cheapskates ). Point is, electric cooking for us is a genuine working solution. We're not eating salads and crackers because we've run out of power. Nor are we actually eating out instead of cooking onboard.
We do sometimes vary what we cook depending on power- things like tacos or risotto hardly use any power, useful on dull days. Helps solve the 'what shall we have for dinner' question!

The biggest problem really is the complete lack of synergy between weather and appetite. On nice sunny days where the batteries are full by lunchtime, we end up firing up the BBQ on the beach, and not using any power at all. And after a succession of miserable rainy days with the batteries slowly running down, SWMBO likes nothing better than knocking up cakes, loafs, stews, and soup. All very power hungry!

We're doubling our battery bank to over 12kwh this year so that should keep her happy. It's really not at all necessary but a boat in the yard was getting rid of two 280Ah batteries for under £250 the pair, and I couldn't resist.

 

[PaulRainbow]

There is a big question as to how one chooses to cook too. Is it every meal in an over, lots of microwave meals, salads?

At home, or on the boat we generally have a light supper that is uncooked 70% of the time - bread and cheese or pate etc
Lunch is our main meal and always cooked but rarely for long - we make every meal from scratch and normally this may take 20 minutes on an induction hob or 30 minutes in an oven or 20 minutes in an air fryer etc - either way lunch is rarely 1Kwh
Christmas lunch used 90 minutes in an over and 60 in an air fryer for about 3kwh total but that is highly unusual
Breakfast is in the coffee machine and toaster or once a week a big stack of homemade American pancakes - again 5 minutes at 1200w for the coffee filter machine, 2 minutes of toaster or 20 minutes of one induction hob for a stack of pancakes.

So an average day is 1.5kwh in cooking - not beyond even winter time solar on many days .. though impossible in the odd weeks of grey gloom we now get

We have a 4 "ring" induction hob, very efficient. We also have a combination microwave oven, don't use the oven much. A thermal cooker is extremely efficient, For instance, i can do a pot roast, with all the potatoes and veg, for 10-15 minutes of use on one ring of the hob, that's probably 1/4 of a Kwh. We also have an instant pot, which is very efficient. Breakfast is cereals, lunch is a small salad or a sandwich mostly. Dinner is our main mean and always cooked from scratch.