The first dawn of morning’s early light coming over the beautiful mountains, and the smell of fresh coffee! Aaahh, one of my favorite rewards for some of the extra work I do to stay at our off grid home. One of my morning luxuries is actually Espresso. I used to be a tea drinker until one business trip to Italy back in ’97.
That fateful trip to Italy
On that trans-Atlantic trip, I traveled as the software engineer, with a sales guy for our high tech wireless company. That meant that during the day, I would convince the customer’s engineers that our product wouldn’t harm their network in any way, and at night I would pull out my equipment and finish the software testing in a hotel room. I worked quite a bit on that trip. At lunchtime, the client company provided lunch for all employees and we joined them. Afterward everyone would line up at these coffee bars, and drink a coffee like substance in tiny little cups and saucers. (it looked kind of silly to me at that time). This was my first espresso. I found it hard to get my hot tea at the hotel late at night, because the kitchen would close. However, I did discover you could get those “little coffees” at the bar, anytime. Boom, I was hooked.
Flash Forward many years
Now that Starbucks and all the espresso stands have invaded America, I enjoy my 4 shots of espresso each morning. How does that work off grid, on solar power? Yes, to make the beverage you need pressurized steam to run through the right amount of coffee. Do I have some kind of steam boiler on my stove to do it? No, this is the one place where we compromise and “short circuit” the batteries to heat up a small amount of water. See why I normally don’t like this.
How much power does that take?
Because we are talking about 4 to 8 oz of water, it doesn’t take too much power. For many years I used a, Mr Coffee home espresso machine to make it. In fact I went through 2 of them in about 5 years. Recently I upgraded, and purchased something a little more expensive, $70 vs $39. This new unit from Hamilton Beach, has several unexpected benefits while providing my favorite beverage.
Power stored in a battery bank , or ‘juice’ is measured as Amp-Hours(AH), or more universally as Watt-Hours(WH). When a battery bank is full it has a certain number of WH available for use. For example, the standard deep cycle marine battery used in the “Small Emergency Genverter” design has about 35 AH available at 12 volts. That is 875 WH per charge cycle. [Find out more about this genverter system by signing up for our email list in the right column --> ]
First, my old faithful Mr Coffee espresso machines have worked well, but tend to take about 6 minutes or so to do the four shots at once. It draws about 900W during that time. Basically there is an electric heater that boils the water as steam out through to make espresso. This works out to about 90 WH per espresso drink for me. The nice feature about this system is that you start it, walk away, and it finishes the job. I found this unit at Amazon for your convenience.
The Hamilton Beach unit operates quite differently with a water reservoir and a strong pump. The water is pumped through a small heated coil, where it is converted to steam before going thought the coffee. Making espresso is a two step process. You put in the coffee, and press the power button to pre-heat the element until a ready light comes on. Once on, there is very little power draw.
The second step, is to hit the pump button and wait for your shots to pour! This unit requires slightly more manual intervention than the Mr Coffee unit, but the espresso is great, and less power is used. A drawback is that it will only make 2 shots at a time. Watching our power meter, it took 1AH to preheat, and 1.5AH to pour. That makes for 30WH for two or 60WH for my morning 4 shots!
I save 30WH per coffee, which means I have have espresso with less power guilt, and better taste each morning! You might want to give this a try if you enjoy espresso too!
Do you make espresso at home? What is your favorite machine? Do you know how much power it uses? Please let us know, leave a comment!
Update: I recently purchased a P4400 “Kill a Watt Monitor” and measured the power for the Hamilton Beach machine and found it takes 30WH for the first 2 shots.
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Great story!
I use Bialetti stove top espresso makers myself, but they are surely horrible for power consumption.
You have me considering getting a “real” machine now.
Dave Doolin | Website In A Weekend´s last blog ..Blogging Goals for 2010: Answers are Easy, the Questions are Hard!
I’ve heard a lot of unique ways of making espresso that I’ve seen. Do you find that the second machine makes better espresso?
Mike Crimmins´s last blog ..N.O. Brew Storyville Mocha Review
The second machine has that natural light froth on top like shots fro Starbucks and is better than the old stuff!
Very cool! And just saw that you wrote that when I was re-reading the article. Sorry, long day. Either way, thanks for the comment. I don’t know much about living off the grid, but I like things are more earth friendly – whether it’s shade grown coffee or doing something at home to conserve energy.
Mike Crimmins´s last blog ..N.O. Brew Storyville Mocha Review
I like the old fashioned perked coffee. This morning I measured the power consumption of my old percolator at 0.125 kWH from start to finish of cycle. It makes four big mugs of good coffee. Measure says that is about 8 cups worth of liquid. Heater element draws 623 watts.