The "shakedown cruise" continues with the solar panels. It may well continue for some time, as there are a lot of possible things that can go wrong. That may not sound very encouraging. But there is no reason for big discouragement yet.
There was an experiment that I was anxious to try. That was to cook something with the small egg cooker device. It rates out at 300 watts, so the inverter should be able to handle it. In fact, it DID handle it, and handle it with ease. However, it wasn't the best possible set up, as the meatball didn't get cooked! It also took too doggone long. One's patience can become overtaxed while waiting for this thing to cook a meal.
The way this egg cooker works is that you pour a few ounces of water into a hot plate type thing, which boils the water, and the steam cooks whatever. In this case, it was built to cook eggs. Cooking anything else is not within the intended use of the device, so it shouldn't be a source of consternation if the experiment didn't work well. Despite this not so good result, I think there is a chance to make it work. The problem is that it was too inefficient in terms of delivering heat to the meatball.
It was just about an ounce of an a half of meat on this meatball, and it was frozen in the fridge. It had to overcome that and the fact that you really don't want to put a raw meatball on top of where the egg usually sits. My set up included a plastic device to segregate it from the rest of the device, which means no clean up. It also means that two cycles through, and the meatball was still uncooked. You can cook a lot of eggs in that time.
I'll try another way the "next time". That's the cooking part. What about the battery's performance? This particular battery can certainly handle this and much more. But the inverter is limited to just 500 watts. It discharged the battery a bit more than I would have liked, but it is another cloudy day. Not too cloudy to run the charger, though. It was expected that it would use plenty of capacity, but for a short time. Therefore, the cooker must get its job done within one cycle, which is about 15 minutes. If I had kept up with the experiment until the meatball was cooked, I might well have fully discharged the battery, and the thing might well have taken an hour to cook the friggin' little meatball.
Just in case you're interested, I finished cooking it on the hotplate. The hotplate uses 1200 watts, so that's out with this setup. It cooked up in no time. I put the meatball in a tortilla, and had a blast eating it. Also, I had cool whip and blueberries as a dessert. Not too bad. Not high cuisine, but good enough for this old fart.
I had a little fun with this "hack" of an egg cooker device, which was powered by the sun. How 'bout that?
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