Is it possible to bake bread using an 18V Power Tool Battery? Recently, I set out to answer this question. In the back yard I set up a table and connected my mini solar electric PV2L oven to a Ryobi 18V power tool battery with alligator clips.
After a few adjustments and a short wait, the oven was able to reach over 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
Use Cases
While large solar battery systems can be expensive, commodity 18V power tool batteries are widely available and easy to charge with a small solar panel. A portable oven like this would be great for remote job sites, camping and rural areas to name a few. Since there is a valid use case for this kind of technology, my hope this that manufacturers will pick up on the idea and create simple, affordable and refined products that people can use to cook food in sparse conditions with minimal power requirements.
Design
My oven is basically the same design I wrote about in the last article, in which it ran off a single 100 watt solar panel and nothing else. I used it to cook hot dogs and chicken. A link to that video and article is posted on this page.
I am absolutely not a cook, but a family member gave me some leftover yeast bread dough. So I used it to make a couple of test samples… err small bread rolls, and put them in a tin foil pan for the test.
Of course more food can fit inside, but I only wanted to prove the concept. If there is one thing I can do, it’s play with food and burn it in a prototype device. This is real science.
Power Source
If you’ve seen some of my prior work, you probably know I like to operate devices, such as cooking appliances, directly off of solar panels – this is called PV-to-Load. Lest anyone think my designs don’t function off a battery, this demonstration literally shows my PV-to-Load mini solar electric oven running off of a power tool battery alone.
These prototypes don’t care at all where the DC voltage is coming from – battery, solar panel or both. It’s very exciting to cook with nothing but a solar panel in my yard, but an 18V power tool battery is interesting too.
I hope you enjoyed this short look at my mini solar electric oven running off of a power tool battery.
More Information
If you want to see this oven in action running off an 18v Ryobi power tool as well as a solar panel, check out the videos posted on this page below. Thanks for reading – see you next time. -DD-
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