A 200Ah battery will keep your larger appliances humming while you enjoy yourself off the grid. A conventional pressure cooker can be used on fire or a gas stove top but an electric pressure cooker needs to be hooked on electricity. So will a 200Ah battery provide enough power to run an electric pressure cooker?
A 200Ah battery can provide enough power to run a 700-watt electric pressure cooker for 40 minutes. This is enough time to cook some of your favorite meals off the appliance.
In this article, we take you through the numbers and safety parameters for a 200Ah battery.
Power for an Electric Pressure Cooker
The average electric pressure cooker uses between 500 and 700 watts. Electric pressure cookers work by heating up water until it boils under pressure. This causes steam to form inside the pot and cook your food.
Pressure Cooker Watt-hour Requirements
Electrical energy is measured in Watt-Hours. The length of time the pressure cooker operates determines how much power it uses. Watt-hours take into consideration the number of hours you will be running your Pressure Cooker.
To calculate Watt-Hours you multiply the Wattage of the device or appliance and multiply by the number of hours you use the device.
Watt-Hours = Watts X Hours
If you want to use a pressure cooker for 1 hour, you will need 700 Wh of energy.
This number will help us determine if our battery has enough capacity for the electric pressure cooker.
How Many Amps Does an Electric Pressure Cooker Draw?
In order to get the number of amps the electric pressure cooker will draw you convert the watt requirements to amps. To convert watts to amps you divide the wattage by the voltage of your system.
A 700-watt pressure cooker will need around 5.83 amps to run when using it from the standard 120V outlet. This is the number of amps that it will be drawing from the inverter. Depending on the DC voltage of the inverter you can calculate the number of amps the pressure cooker will be drawing through the inverter.
The voltage in a battery bank is usually between 12v and 24v depending on how you wire the system.
For a 12v system
700Wh/12v = 58 amps
So the Electric pressure cooker will be drawing 58 amps. Will our battery be able to provide these amps?
What Does 200 Amp-Hour Mean?
Amp-hour rating in batteries gives the charge in amps that can be drawn from a battery over a certain time given in hours.
Amp-Hour) rating of a battery can also be calculated by multiplying the rated capacity by its terminal voltage. But this does not represent the real-world performance of batteries.
A Deep Cycle Battery battery is intended to produce the charge for a long period of time like 20 hours. So for a 200 Ah battery, it should produce at least 10 amps over a 20-hour period.
However, you can go higher or lower depending on the appliance you are using. Deep cycle batteries are recommended to be discharged at 20% of their capacity so for a 200 Ah battery the max discharge per hour would be 40 amps meaning it can last 5 hours.
For lead acid batteries, this can be lower as they can only be discharged up to half their capacity meaning it’s only 100Ah of its capacity that is usable. This means it can last only 2.5 hours when discharged at 40 amps and 5 hours at 20 amps and 10 hours at 10 amps.
How many watts-hours is a 200 Ah Battery?
You can use the following formula to determine how many watts can be drawn from a battery.
Watts = Volts x Amps
So if your battery is 12v and has a 200 Ah capacity, then you can draw 2400 Watts from it. This is for the full battery cycle. With the 40 amps max draw it means you can get 480 watts max per hour. You can push this to 50 amps or 600 watts per hour with LiFePO4 batteries.
How Long Will a 200Ah Battery Run an Electric Pressure Cooker
Looking at our Watt-hour requirement the 200ah battery will have enough capacity. However, a 58 amp draw may not be feasible for some batteries or wiring configurations of your system. However, we can still run our pressure cooker for a limited time.
We already know the battery can support 480 watts but we need 700 watts for the pressure cooker to run for an hour. So how long is 480 watts?
(480/700) = 0.69 hrs
In minutes 0.69 x 60 = 41.4 minutes
A 200Ah 12v battery will run a pressure cooker for 41 minutes. This is without any other appliance drawing power from the battery.
Different foods require different times to cook in the pressure cooker and different temperatures which will require less power. 41 minutes is more than enough to cook most meals in your electric pressure cooker. A Turkey Breast will need around 30 minutes or 20 minutes for some beef stew.
A pressure cooker is an energy saver compared to electric ovens and air fryers.
Conclusion
The amount of power that an electric pressure cooker used depends on the size. The size of the appliance is measured in quarts. Smaller cookers are typically around 6 quarts while larger models can be as large as 10 quarts or more. The amount of power also varies depending on whether you’re cooking at high or low pressure.