Need my coffee and teas even when camping way off-grid

We love our coffee. We also love the simplicity of an electric hot water kettle. Therefore, running a hot water kettle on solar is a no-brainer. I have the start the day off on the right foot. Running the electric hot water kettle on solar uses a lot more energy than most people think. I wanted to show everyone how much power it takes to heat water using this method.

Running our water kettle off our IC-2000 Inverter Charger

Plugging in the hot water tank into the back of our Sprinter van is easy. We will let our solar and battery system do all the work. It does a great job, but it really drains our battery bank. Take a look at the DC load the hot water kettle draws from our battery bank. Our Go Power 2000 Inverter Charger shows the real time DC drain when running items on our batteries. As you can see we are draining 148.5 Amps to heat our water. 

148.5 Amp Draw using water kettle on the inverter.

It takes about 15 minutes to heat, but when our battery is low from over use, we needed to head out into the sun. While this is a big load, it is only temporary and we decided we didn’t care because hot coffee is alright by us. It was too shady at our National Park campsite in Cade’s Cove. No worries, a little drive into the sun will let our 320 Watts of solar charge the battery back up in no time.

Off-grid camping in the national park.

Adding in a little coffee or tea in the afternoon always makes my camping experience a little better. Knowing that I can do it on electricty created by solar power makes the coffee taste better :)

Since we wrote this article I have switched back and forth from French Press, Pour Over and Espresso.

UPDATED DEC 2022 6TH OCT 2016 BY CHAD WHITNEY