Kettle. Electric or stove?

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Free_Spirit

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Hi. I am very new to boating and just purchased a Maxum motor cruiser for use on the river. The boat has a stove that runs on electric or burns alcohol. Should I use this to boil a stove kettle or buy a small electric one to plug in to the socket. We only have 1 leisure battery and I am worried the electric one would chew up the battery if we are moored up.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks
 
Hi Free Spirit

If you are using a mains inverter to power your kettle, you will indeed hurt your battery by using it. A quick calculation, lets say your kettle is 2.5kw. at 12v that relates to roughly 200a, for about 4-5 mins to boil an average amount of water.

My advise (to a fair amount of people I speak to almost daily when asked from the sterling-power towers) is not to put that much strain on it unless you like changing batteries! ;)


One of those portable gas stoves has been fantastic for my little cruiser - have thought about using an induction hob but the gas stove can be brought to the outside of the boat/to the beach with ease so i think its going to win this season again.

Also, its a lot quicker to change the bottle compared to charge your batteries (unless you have a lithium...... :rolleyes: )
 
It depends on whether you usually have shorepower and how long you'll be moored up away from it for.

If you have mains electricity and wont be away from it for too long, then boil up a kettle and fill a large flask/insulated urn with boiling water. If you'll be away for a while then use the alcohol stove. It's not fast, but gets the job done.
 
We use both. We have a kettle we use on the hob if we are mooring away from shore power for a few days in the same spot or we have a small 1kw electric kettle which we use on shore power or from our inverter when we are cruising.
 
Free_Spirit said:
Hi. I am very new to boating and just purchased a Maxum motor cruiser for use on the river. The boat has a stove that runs on electric or burns alcohol. Should I use this to boil a stove kettle or buy a small electric one to plug in to the socket. We only have 1 leisure battery and I am worried the electric one would chew up the battery if we are moored up.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks
Click to expand...

I imagine a 3 pin socket on your boat will only be powered when hooked up to shore power .
Why not try the spirit stove ?
Must say a gas hob is a minimum 'must have' requirement for us.
Be sure to have adequate air supply when burning any fuel .

.
 
We have never had a problem with the spirit stoves and use this when away from mains power. Great way of cooking breakfast when waking up at anchor!
Otherwise use a low wattage (1000W) kettle off the mains when connected.
Tried a 12v kettle but takes ages and seems a pointless drain on the battery when the spirit stove is available.
 
We used to run a 1000w kettle of the inverter. It worked but it was a much better idea all round to run the engine when the inverter was doing any serious work as at least 70 odd amps ( actually 140 as I use to run both engines and turn on the switch that connected the batteries together) came from the engines which lessened the overall kick in the teeth to the batteries.
 
yes with twin engines this would most certainly help, and you can probably get away with one battery for this. The only thing to remember is that some alternators do not output their full current unless you have quite a high idle, so on tick over you will probably get 50a out of a 70a alternator (certainly the way on my bosch/yanmar set up). Another one of my thoughts to use electric, but then its soo peaceful in some harbours, it would be a shame to have to start an engine just for a brew :)
 
jrudge said:
We used to run a 1000w kettle of the inverter. It worked but it was a much better idea all round to run the engine when the inverter was doing any serious work as at least 70 odd amps ( actually 140 as I use to run both engines and turn on the switch that connected the batteries together) came from the engines which lessened the overall kick in the teeth to the batteries.
Click to expand...

They do use a fair bit of power.

We have used our 1kw kettle without the engine running from our two domestic batteries but only when we have known we will be moving off shortly anyway. We don't use it if we are mooring for an extended period. Then we use the gas kettle.
 
putting that much strain on your battery just isn't worth it for this sized boat at least (and with one battery) why put it under strain when you have an alternative method. You would curse yourself if you got a dead battery from making a brew
 
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