Cooking & appliances

Electric vs Kerosene vs Propane vs Diesel

In order to heat and cook food, you need to first decide what energy source will fuel your cooking. While cooking aboard, you primarily can choose from the following energy types:

As with everything, all options come with trade offs. But here’s our thoughts on the energy sources we’ve tried, and some we haven’t tried but have researched a lot.

Note: There are also more esoteric fuels like butane, esbit, or denatured alcohol. We’ve used denatured alcohol in backpacking, but it’s getting harder and harder to buy, and the good burners like the “Origo 3000” are no longer sold.

Electricity is the best (in our opinion)

Electricity is going to give you the best house-like experience, but you must either be connected to shore power (which many liveaboards living on slips are) or generate lots of electricity (if offshore or on a mooring). Unlimited electricity allows you to use easy and time-efficient appliances like induction burners, refrigerators, Instant Pots, Airfryers, and more.

You can also keep energy usage low with electric appliances, which we cover in this section.

If you don’t have limitless or even lots of electricity, most people use propane as their fuel source. Propane also gives a great cooking experience — it’s fast to ignite and can reach high temperatures quickly. It’s also affordable, and can be purchased easily.

Propane though becomes more tricky in that you need to figure out where to store the propane tanks safely. If there is a leak (or if the tank rusts through), propane vapors can settle into the bilges of your boat (the vapors are heavier than air) — making your home highly flammable.

Kerosene works

For the first two years, we lived aboard Paperwing on a mooring ball. This meant that we couldn’t take advantage of shore power, and we felt weird running a generator to charge our batteries (loud, a lot of emissions). Paperwing came installed with very little solar to optimize for sailing offshore, which meant we couldn’t generate enough electricity to cook more than once a day, let alone have a refrigerator.

For the first 6 months, we didn’t use electricity at all to cook. Instead, we exclusively used a kerosene camping stove that the previous owners gave us (they chose kerosene because its widely available in many countries, and they had planned to sail to the South Pacific). We had considered installing a real Kerosene stove such as a Taylor Stoves, but the owners had actually tried one and found it to require too much maintenance. This seemed to line up with our research as well, so we committed to our camping stove.

It worked quite well (contrary to popular opinion). There’s a song-and-dance needed to actually get it going (you need to pour some denatured alcohol into a cup and light it, and as it burns off, slowly start pumping the stove to create pressure and open a fuel valve to actually light the burner). However, this ritual eventually becomes second nature, and it encourages a level of focus and patience that makes cooking feel like a craft. You can then control cooking heat by changing the pressure (such as pumping the stove more or opening the fuel valve) — and we found the stove to generate a good amount of heat.

That being said, our kerosene stove had downsides. For one, breathing kerosene fumes comes with risks. We just assumed that if hundreds of millions of people could live with kerosene, we could deal with the health risks too. Secondly, we never felt comfortable walking away from the stove while lit, and there were a couple of flare ups that had us genuinely scared we were about to burn down the boat. After a particularly bad flare up, we decided that we needed a better permanent solution for our day-to-day cooking. For short term usage or as a backup, kerosene is a great and accessible fuel.

Diesel is best in cold

Diesel is attractive because its exhaust is pumped overboard (unlike our kerosene stove), there are lots of reliable stoves that are easy to use, and you can use the main fuel tank to also fuel your stove. However, diesel stoves are expensive, there’s still a fair amount of installation hassle, they emit more emissions than kerosene and propane stoves, and they produce a lot of stray heat in the cabin (compared to our kerosene stove, which produces less stray heat).

If you live in a cold environment, this extra stray heat is actually a massive advantage, and why people in higher latitudes often have diesel stoves running at all times. If you live north of Point Conception on the West Coast (like we do), you might benefit from a diesel stove during winters and shoulder seasons. We go back and forth wanting one mainly for the ability to combat humidity — being able to circulate hot, dry air is a luxury on a boat.

Where we’ve landed

Given all these options, we’ve settled on electricity as our primary cooking source, with a kerosene stove as a backup (especially when we are low on electricity, sailing, or need a lot of heat for a meal). There are ways to optimize how much energy your cooking consumes, which we’ll cover in the next section.

Low-energy electric cooking

If you want to ensure your cooking uses less energy, prioritize appliances that trap heat and hold it well. We’ve found the best appliances to be electric pressure cookers (like an Instant Pot), and to a lesser extent, air fryers. Microwaves are also a great option from an energy efficiency standpoint, but they take up so much space in a galley that they weren’t worth it for us.

Our galley regularly employs these appliances:

We also tried rice cookers, larger Instant Pots, and smaller air fryers — but they all either used too much electricity or provided too little utility. Most of our meals use both the 3 quart Instant pot and the air fryer for different components. We primarily use the induction cooktop for boiling water for tea, oatmeal, and pasta. If we aren’t connected to shore power, we rarely use it unless we have excess solar.

If you can live without a few foods, Instant Pots have a lot of advantages over induction or other burners. Beside using less electricity, they are also very self contained so there is no worry about spilling while cooking. Under passage, this means we don’t need to gimbal the appliances (only possible as the appliances are oriented “stern to forward”), and we can also release all steam outside of the boat. In the constant fight against humidity, being able to lift the 3 quart Instant Pot and release all steam through a galley hatch or up on the deck helps immensely.

Electricity usage details

We budget about 0.5 kwh per day for all our electric needs, and use a 2,000 watt inverter for cooking. A 2,000 watt inverter can run a 3 quart Instant Pot and 4 quart air fryer at the same time. If you want to run induction and something else at the same time, a second inverter is normally easier than installing one large inverter. Since these appliances only run for a short time, we’ve found that you don’t really need an expensive inverter, and instead we recommend going with the cheapest, thinnest, least efficient inverter you can find. A thin inverter is much easier to mount, and expensive inverters can be saved for long running loads.

While on the mooring, we found 0.5 kwh to be very easy to generate in the summer with only 200 watts of panels (generate more like 0.9 kwh), and this amount allows us to run our electronics, lights, cooking, and even the dehumidifier almost as much as we like. In the winter, however, this won’t quite be enough solar so you’ll either need to add more, or find way to bring power in.

Refrigeration

When at anchor or on a mooring ball, we don’t use refrigeration. A refrigerator is a nearly constant power draw, and even a continuous 10 watts over 24 hours is ~ 0.25 kwh. A 32 qt fridge should use at least 0.25 kwh in the cold, and about 0.5 kwh in the heat. We could probably support these loads in the summer, but we’d need to add more solar and complexity to our system.

In the winter it’s would be difficult to support refrigeration without a lot of solar. However, in the winter it’s easy to create a “root cellar” below the water line in one of our storage compartments. This can keep cheese, vegetables, and many other things good for a surprisingly long time. The water outside of the boat is cold enough. In the summer, we use a different strategy and try to get fresh food that has never been washed or refrigerated Once refrigerated, vegetables go bad far faster, and last a surprisingly long time otherwise.

When we are on a slip, we do use a small fridge. We mainly store proteins like hummus, yogurt, tofu, and ground meat. It’s also great for meal prep.