Ever wonder how much electricity your ANOVA Precision Cooker uses, while cooking?

Anova Precision® Cooker First Cook Essentials
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The answer: surprisingly (to me) very little.

Having just yesterday SV’d some baby back pork ribs for 20 hours, I started wondering what it was costing me in electricity, to run my Anova Precision Cooker for that long, or for any period, for that matter.

So today, when I was SV’ing some 1 ½” thick filet mignons, for 2 ½ hours, I thought I’d plug in my trusty Kill-A-Watt meter.

My last electric power bill worked out to a rate of $ 0.164/kW including taxes and fees.

I ran the Anova for 2 hrs and 51 minutes (which included the cooking time, and the 20 minutes it took to get from 120 F tap water to 140 F for cooking), and it used 0.67 kW.

So that cook cost me $ 0.10 (IE: just one thin dime).

It probably used the first 5 or 6 cents, just getting from 120 F to 140 F, and the rest of it while circulating the water, and keeping the temperature up to where it’s supposed to be.

My Anova cooking vessel has a lid which probably helps in reduction of heat loss (as well as evaporation), which would help to reduce the cost too.

I was quite pleased with the result of my little test but nowhere near as pleased as I was with the filet mignons.

time
time3224×2922 994 KB

kW used
kW used3224×3119 1.08 MB

rate
rate3224×3119 1020 KB

total cost
total cost3419×2850 1.01 MB

2 Likes
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Actually, yes, I had wondered. I’d always suspected that the energy requirements for sous vide cooking were fairly modest since cooking temperatures are relatively low and once the device is up to temp it doesn’t take much heat to maintain. It’s certainly interesting to see it quantified, though.

Thanks for sharing.