My 12 Volt Hotplate Cooktop Prototype – Cooking without an inverter

This project has the goal of the total conversion of a portable kitchen cooktop / hot plate to pure 12 volts DC operation – NO inverter! Second is to show and demonstrate that such an appliance should exist. I believe this type of 12 volt appliance should be common and affordable.

With a 12 volt cooktop, cooking dinner off a car battery would be extremely accessible and simple. A 100 watt solar panel on the battery would extend cooking options to be almost limitless. Renewable Cooking anywhere – without fuel!

For the longest time I have searched for a 12 volt hot plate (portable cooktop) that has the form and function of a standard kitchen appliance. But unfortunately such items seem exceedingly rare.

Powerful 12v cooking appliances do not seem to be very common or widespread, but there is NO technical reason they couldn’t t be. It should not be necessary to use a complicated and expensive inverter to step the DC voltage up to 120/240 AC and then into the hotplate / cooktop. I have tested this previously using a very small system, but it’s not much of a challenge, it lacks simplicity and efficiency.
After a great deal of struggle and work, I finally got a working protoype of a pure 12 volt hotplate running in my solar workshop. I successfully boiled a pot of noodles right there on my workbench with small 12v LiFePo4 batteries. The efficiency of this hotplate / cooktop trounced the usual inverter setup – there is no comparison. Inverters waste a lot of DC power in the conversion process.
It took several tries to get the 12v cooktop “mostly working”. Unfortunately I ran into a few unexpected challenges.

First was the amount of heat inside the cooktop. I was unprepared for how HOT they get internally. The usual fiberglass and APT insulation I used were literally burned to a crisp. Copper fittings I normally rely on for heating elements were turned crispy and brittle. As a result, early tests of the device failed, burned and emitted poisonous smoke. I had to run out of my shop in pain, because whatever was in the smoke triggered my migraine symptoms. Back to square one…

Second was a dusty grey fiberous substance inside the cooktops I opened. Working on the cooktops required a lot of breathing protection. The substance looks exactly like Asbestos to me. Realizing I could be scattering Asbestos all over my shop, had to shut down the project, clean up the workshop and send a sample into the laboratory for testing. I could not continue work until the results came back.

Third was that some off the shelf cooktops are impossible to get into without destroying the glass. It is usually sealed with a high temperature sealant, which will not respond to heat. Prying at it will shatter the glass. But eventually I found a workable solution to continue building the prototype.

I hope this prototype stirs interest in the market for such appliances – hopefully in time, this type of 12v appliance will be manufactured, cheap and readily available!

Thanks for reading and have a good day – DD