Hello fellas. Firstly let me say, I am not a chef. But I am very interested in using this unit as part of a meal delivery service that I am thinking about. But I am concerned with the power usage that this requires.
Generally speaking (with regards to electricity cost vs propane gas costs in your local area), do you guys think it would cost me significantly more money to boil 10 chicken breast filets in the Anova vs Boiling water with the traditional method and monitoring the temperature manually?
What do you guys think? I am not overly experienced so any comments and thoughts would be extremely helpful.
Per my internet search an electric kettle is about 80% efficient at boiling water, whereas a gas stovetop is about 20% efficient. Now that’s the efficiency for the electricity coming into your house ( which is what you care about ) not the efficiency that would include the energy required to generate the electricity.
An Anova isn’t a kettle but that’s what I found.
But, you don’t need to boil the water with sous vide . You can cook the breasts at 140°F for at least 95 minutes and get pasteurization and the breasts will be the moistest that you have ever had. Like eating solid chicken soup. It’s remarkable.
The breasts can be held at that temp for a few hours and served when ready. That’s part of the beauty of sous vide. It gives you time flexibility.
The unit uses 800 watts at peak. But once you reach target temp the electric consumption drops way off. I’ll refer you to vtemkin’s work earlier on this billboard. His good work showed an average consumption of 165 or so watts/ hour. At 15cents/Kwh that’s about 2.5 cents per hour. You can run the unit off the change under your couch cushions.
Hope that helps.
I measured the heating of 5.5l of water from 20C to 70C. It took 32 minutes and 0.37kwh of electricity. This means that thermal efficiency was 86%. The induction cooking claims around 90%, regular electric stoves - 60-70%, gas stoves - 30-60%. (5.5l50C=275Kcal=0.32Kwh=0.860.37Kwh - for those who want to follow my calculations.)
