Beach Cooking

I think on crock pots they should have a watt rating. This watt rating is amount of energy per time. Then you can determine how much energy is used in 8 hr day.

Use a crock pot that doesn’t turn on and off – just one that has “low” and “high”. With any luck you can figure out how many watts that is by reading the manual.

If not, you need to find somebody with a reasonable size amp gauge and have them check the amps when it’s running. That’s easy to do, if you have the meter.

A problem with using the nameplate data is that is the maximum, if the slow cooker has multiple heat settings or a thermostat, the actual usage will be less than the name plate watts * the time of use. However, if you do have a very simple cooker with no thermostat and run it on the high setting (which might be too high) then you can multiply the nameplate wattage by the time. For example, I have a simple slow cooker that is 120W, if I ran it for 8 hours on high, the power used would be 120 * 8 = 960 Watt hours, usually electricity is sold buy kilowatt hours, so divide by 1000 for 0.96kWh
But if the unit had a thermostat or was run on something other than the high setting, you’d probably need something like this: to measure the actual power (these are available lots of places, this was just the first I found)

There are quite a number of variables that might be involved in providing a PROOF of a given portable solar cooker as being as quick or quicker in cooking a family meal to the same point of being “done” than a given electric “crock pot”.

The fact of the solar cooker (if it DOES do a good job of cooking) being cheaper is unquestionable — it’s FREE! But, even with a cloudless hot summer sun beaming down on the solar cooker, is it QUICKER than any given crock pot?

The information that should be provided on a lable on the particular crock pot itself will give the electrical ratings concerning the maximum voltage and normal operating Wattage (volt-amperes) for the given crock pot. What you would be paying the electrical supply people for is the Watt-hours (power) you drained from their supply for the time it takes to cook your meal to your satisfaction.

You would need to have a Wattmeter in-line with the electrical supply cord to the crock pot to record the wattage drain, and a time meter to record the time lapse between start and stop of the cooking operation. Both of these could be recorded conveniently on a circular chart instrument. With these values, you can determine the amound of electrical power that was drained from the supplier. The wattage probably will vary some throughout the cooking, and an average might need to be established. A checking of the latest bill sent from the electric power company should let you calculate (if you don’t know already) what you are charged per watt-hour for your electrical supply. The rest is simple math multiplication.

Use a device called a “Kill-a-Watt”. It is an in-line watt-meter that measures the electricity that goes to the appliance.

Pick on up at for about $20. (searching “watt meter” will give you several options)