Sous Vide Koozie - anyone tried it?

It looks nice, and neoprene is a good insulator. I’m not sure that the return on investment stacks up though. The Anova consumes 800 or 900 W when it’s heating. To keep water for the average recipe warm, I’ve seen it switch on (on average) about 20% of the time (measured by looking at my consumption meter). The actual figure will vary greatly with season and location. Let’s be ultra-pessimistic and assume that the Anova has its heater turned on 50% of the time to keep the water at the target temperature.

Insulating the container will reduce heat loss. Let’s be generous and assume that, with the cover, the container will lose heat 50% slower than it would without, meaning that the Anova will need to turn on only 25% of the time. So, instead of consuming 0.4 kWh per hour, it’ll consume 0.2 kWh per hour.

The average cost of 1 kWh is $0.11. The saving with the cover is 0.2 kWh per hour, so that’s $0.022 per hour. To recover the purchase price of $25.74 for the cover will therefore take 1,170 hours of cooking. (That’s a best-case scenario; the actual number of hours may well be three or four times larger.) That’s a lot of cooking…

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