Road Trip ? Crockpot is 265W, 120V and my inverter is 1000w. Will I be ok cooking with it on the road?

Inverter will be OK. Will you be running off the battery, or while driving? You don’t want a dead battery. Continuous output of 265W means it will use 530W of battery power every hour. 12V x AmpHour rating will give you WattHour. Compare that to 530 WattHour for the inverter and you can figure out how many hours to a dead battery.

This will primarily be used while driving but I’ll really need to find out how long I can run it if we end up parking the car for any length of time. I really don’t want the drama of a dead battery. I know a lot of that calculation will have to do with how healthy our battery is (I’m not sure). Please excuse my ignorance with this but how do I figure out how many AmpHours my battery has?

Sometimes the A-Hr rating is printed on a sticker on top of the battery. Your vehicle may be like mine, where the 12V outlet turns off if you turn the engine off. Good for the battery, bad for your meal.
Look on the internet for plans for a solar oven. Many years ago I saw a design that goes up to 350F! Then you could cook while parked in a sunny area.

Arg, I just finished reading the specs for the inverter and it looks as though the inverter will need to be wired directly to the battery and it is recommended that you have it wired to a separate battery. Sounds expensive :-(

Yes, our 12V outlets turn off when we turn the car off. I hadn’t though of that!

You’ve already bought it? That’s unfortunate – I bought a ‘truckers’ cooker at a major truck stop that cooks food with no fuss off an inverter or the car’s cigarette plug.

Yeah, $70 for a battery from Costco, but how to install and wire it up?

1600W capability means it can draw 133 Amps from the battery. Maybe even double that! This is a lot more than a cigarette lighter jack can put out (20A). That is a big inverter you got.

@RocketGuy lol. Yes, it is. I think I’ll need a “favour” from an auto tech friend of mine.

Worse comes to worse, I’ll take the inverter back and try to think of alternate ways of feeding 5 people on the road.

@YARNLADY My problem is that I need to feed 5 people, so a crockpot is the the way to go because they are large. How big is the one you got from the truck stop?

Yes, it will work if you connect it right to the battery. I would leave your engine running while you use your inverter for such a high demand purpose.

@tranquilsea It’s fairly small – heats up three cans of soup or five pieces of fried chicken or three large potatoes. I once used it to re-heat six slices of pizza.

I’d double-check the rating on that cooker. That figure seems low for a resistance heater appliance. If it’s correct, you should be fine. If you’re going to be using this with the vehicle engine shut off, you should install an auxiliary battery in parallel with the starting battery, the kit for doing this is available from auto accessory places such as JC Whitney. This will keep you from draining the battery needed to start your engine. I have one of these setups in my old Power Wagon, it works fine.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land Thanks for your answer. I read up on dedicating a battery to the inverter and I’ll just have to price out how much it will cost to set it up as neither my husband nor I have any automotive modification experience.

@tranquilsea The instructions are usually simple, the biggest issue is finding a safe place to mount the auxiliary battery and ensuring that it has proper overcurrent protection (fusing). An automotive electrical shop can do this for you.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land Thanks :-)

A typical car battery is 42 amp -hours. If your crock pot draws 265 W you can figure 50% efficiency from the inverter or 530 W . Dividing by 12 volts, gives you a draw of about 45 amps. So that means you can run the crock pot for 42/45 ~ 1 hour. But your crock pot does not draw 265W all the time. It cycles on an off. Figure it is really on only about ⅓ of the time so it will take 3 hours to draw the battery down.

The fuse in the cig.lighter is only 15 amps – 20 amps so you will need to wire directly to the car battery. You can buy a cheap set of jumper cables and cut them in half so you can clip on to the battery or yo can wire it directly.

A typical car generator produces about 800 to 1000 watts so it has plenty of juice to run the crock pot while you are driving.

Thanks @worriedguy .

I’m concerned about much this setup would effect the alternator in the car too, if we were to install it.

Thanks everyone for your help and information.

You will be fine with this. It’s as simple as adding up the wattage. You will not strain your alternator if it’s less than 10 years old. Always remember, never load an inverter more than 80% of its lowest (not surge) rated wattage.