(Not so)Smart power meters

[Tubetec]

The classic Irish dish of boiled beef or ham , potatoes and cabbage can very easily done in the pressure cooker ,
First the meat is cooked most of the way , then the potatoes and cabbage are added to a metal tray that sits above the cooking liquid , a further ten minutes up at pressure and its all done , in a single pot ,so you save on the washing up as well .

Back in the days when you needed to cut turf or harvest fire wood to cook the energy saving connection with the pressure cooker would have been very obvious ,
In the modern day not so much ,

Pressure cookers seem to have fallen out of fashion to a greater extent , opperator error and the chances of a mishap or previous bad experience scares many off the idea maybe. Modern types generally have interlocking safety features so any chances of doing damage are minimised .
The modern instant pot of course monitors all the parameters so if a problem occurs it all shuts down safely , naturally enough the instant pot also incoprporates all the features of a slow cooker or crock pot if you want it .

 

[scott2000]

The classic Irish dish of boiled beef or ham , potatoes and cabbage can very easily done in the pressure cooker ,
First the meat is cooked most of the way , then the potatoes and cabbage are added to a metal tray that sits above the cooking liquid , a further ten minutes up at pressure and its all done , in a single pot

Man that sounds good...

 

[JohnRoberts]

I recall the beef stew my mother used to make in her pressure cooker some 50+ years ago. She threw in chunks of beef, potatoes and carrots.... the meat would come out melt in your mouth tender. Of course my nostalgia may be exaggerating how good it was, just a little.
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Now I prefer my slow cooker. First I cook the meat for 2 1/2 hours on low (200'F) to make sure it kills any bacteria in the meat, then I add the vegetables and slow cook on simmer (185'F) for 7 hours, for spectacular vegetables and tender meat.

JR

 

[scott2000]

tender meat

Ribs are crazy tender in a slow cooker too. Yeah my mom used to make a california roast in a roasting pan in the oven with the vegetables. So good. I do it in the crock pot now. It's super tender but misses just a bit of something the roaster pan gave it.... maybe childhood...idk

 

[cyrano]

I'm playing with vacuumed meat in an ultrasonic cleaner atm.

Some things do very well in a pressure cooker, others don't. Our classic beef stew, fi, simply can't be made in a pressure cooker. It needs the time on very low heat and a night of cooling down, to be reheated the next day. There simply is not enough time for the spices to develop if you speed it up in a pressure cooker.

 

[fazer]

Cooked Stews taste better after a night in the frig.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I'm playing with vacuumed meat in an ultrasonic cleaner atm.

sous vide?

Some things do very well in a pressure cooker, others don't. Our classic beef stew, fi, simply can't be made in a pressure cooker. It needs the time on very low heat and a night of cooling down, to be reheated the next day. There simply is not enough time for the spices to develop if you speed it up in a pressure cooker.

My mothers beef stew was not heavily seasoned IIRC, but remains very good in my memories.
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I mix my own blend of spices and slow cooking for hours gives them plenty of time to infuse.

JR

 

[Matador]

Heres the electrical comparrison between items cooked in either the oven or an instant pot ,
Does an Instant Pot use a lot of electricity?, it amounts to a massive saving in energy .

However that is a bit silly of a comparison: it's like saying, "I brought my groceries home in my car and used 1 liter of petrol, but that same bag of groceries in a semi truck used 4 liters!" The problem is that the oven could have cooked 4 to 5 (or more) times the volume of stew for (roughly) the same total energy usage from the wall.

Maybe the conclusion is better: if you are cooking a pot of stew, perhaps don't use an appliance meant to cook a far-higher volume of food. For example, we have a small counter-top stove that uses only a fraction of the energy of our normal stove, because it only has to heat a small volume with a tiny airspace (and it can spin up to temperature in a few minutes rather than 10+ of a regular-sized oven).

I could see a good argument that cooking 'fast and hot' is nearly always the best (modulo taste, etc), because it minimizes the opportunity for escape-heat to become a large percentage of the energy use. However some dishes just don't taste right cooked that way.

 

[JohnRoberts]

AFAIK the significant benefit of pressure cookers is cooking meat (food?) faster, thanks to high pressure steam.

I suspect microwave cookers are faster and more efficient by most metrics, ignoring flavor .

I value flavor in my cooked meals.

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I am sensitive to both time and efficiency (energy waste). I have one meal that I still cook in my oven once every week (meat loaf). I cook 12 servings each time. I have thought about slow cooking this but I can't fit the 12 - 1 cup bowls in my cooker. I could cook 6 meals at a time that way but that would take two batches. Baking the 1 cup servings in the oven is neat and convenient. I guess I could slow cook the meatloaf in a large batch and then divide it into 1 cup servings afterwards, but that wouldn't be the same. I like having the intact tomato sauce cap on the single serving meatloaf.

JR

 

[cyrano]

sous vide?

Something like it, but with the ultrasonic added as tenderiser.

My mothers beef stew was not heavily seasoned IIRC, but remains very good in my memories.

Our beef stew isn't heavily seasoned either, but it uses bread as a thickener and that also needs time.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I have decided that next week I will experiment with cooking my meat loaf in one batch inside my slow cooker, and then parse it out into the one cup pyrex freezer dishes . It won't be as cute as baking the individual servings in the oven, but will probably use less energy.
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I have thermal insulation sealing off the glass top cover... the handle gets too hot to touch after which demonstrates to me that the insulation is working and preventing heat loss. The cooking temperature is regulated so less thermal loss means less consumption.
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I have a big brew pot that I use for brewing beer. I have that huge pot wrapped in thermal insulation including the lid... I have looked and nobody makes cook pots with the insulation built in, it wouldn't be that hard to do.

JR

 

[Tubetec]

I just made up beef stew last night ,
440grams of sirloin steak and finely chopped onions lightly fried off in the pressure cooker ,
then some stock added , a glass of wine , a few carrots ,mushrooms and some finely chopped celery ,
lid on and upto pressure for 20 minutes , then a packet of oxtail soup added and its brought back to the boil ,then final seasoning ,

Thats two days worth of food for me , and theres always plenty of gravy left over , which gets added to cooked potatoe peelings and suplements my dogs usual diet , so theres very little food waste either .

Microwave might be ok for reheating , but it wont help to tenderise meat , in fact the opposite it'll come out like old boot leather.

You can argue apples and oranges about the example I gave on pressure cooking , the simple fact remains that efficency is always going to be orders of magnitude better than hob or oven cooked all else being equal .

Let someone else dig up the stats on energy efficiency of slow cookers/ crock pots vs normal oven or stove top , I'll bet the savings are nowhere near what pressure cooking gets you .

Even a standard meat sauce for pasta or chilli , usually cooked stove top comes out much better from the pressure cooker , the flavours meld wonderfully in a tiny fraction of the time .

I not going to argue about the extra flavour difference roasted meats give ,
but theres little in terms of flavour difference between stove top, pressure cooked or slow cooked .

 

[cyrano]

My god, you make a stew with steak?

My cheap side is in shock.

Can't taste as good as a good fatty harder cut that's stewed for hours. The best one I ever made was made while we got lost in the forest. It had been on a real antique cooking stove in a cast iron pot for over eight hours. The meat was almost completely absorbed in the gravy. The spices rose to another, formerly unknown level.

Of course it helped that we were hungry as wolves after dwelling in the forest for an entire day without much food...

 

[Tubetec]

I just wanted quick and easy yesterday so went with the steak for simplicity and short cooking time .
normally id use stewing steak ,which doubles the cooking time in the pressure pot .


Hunger is the best sauce ,

 

[JohnRoberts]

My god, you make a stew with steak?

I used to put rib eye in my chili... now I don't even put rib eye in my mouth....

My cheap side is in shock.

et tu

Can't taste as good as a good fatty harder cut that's stewed for hours. The best one I ever made was made while we got lost in the forest. It had been on a real antique cooking stove in a cast iron pot for over eight hours. The meat was almost completely absorbed in the gravy. The spices rose to another, formerly unknown level.

I use a fat separator to decant off excess liquid fat from fatty cuts of meat. The stew beef they sell these days doesn't have enough fat for me to bother.

Back when I had a dog (30+ years ago) I would pour the cooking fat (from cooking hamburger meat) over his dry food... he really liked that.

Of course it helped that we were hungry as wolves after dwelling in the forest for an entire day without much food...

I've been in situations in the field when C rations actually tasted OK, edible but there was no appetite to ask for seconds.

FWIW the C-rats we were getting in the 70s were left over surplus from the Korean conflict.

JR

 

[cyrano]

If the recipe has ripened for centuries and the chef is aware of what he's doing, there's no fat to decant. It'll dissolve into the gravy without making it fatty.

I agree that what they sell as stew beef is much too lean. You need that fat and the tendons. But that's easily resolved by buying a cut that hasn't been cut down and cleaned.

This beef recipe used to be used for horse meat, from old horses. That meat needs even more time to cook and it's even better. People used to make it by putting it on the stove in the evening and cooking 'till next evening. Then it rested for another 24 hours before being eaten. Tradittionally, it was eaten with bread and a large pickled gurkin. These days, it's almost always eaten with french fries. And mayo

 

[57sputnik]

So I'm reading page 1 about Smart Meters and somehow this thread about slow cooking got appended to it. Meander much?

For those interested in the original topic I've attached a manual for the Landis+Gyr Focus AX Smart Meter and some data I'm able to read from it. In the US a Zigbee mesh network is setup with each customer's meter acting as a node and router. Data collectors - mine is a few hundred yards away - are in streetlights and backhaul the nighborhood's collected data in what appears to be the ISM frequency band.

In Texas Oncor totally blew the rollout on these things because after installing them they immediately destroyed customers old meters preventing correction of readings from the mechanical meters they replaced. The "techs" they hired to install them were unfamiliar reading mechanical meters right to left and they made large errors on the final mechanical read. When customers complained that the readings taken at the time of replacement were wrong Oncor had no audit trail to confirm it. That "hiccup" in rollout was quickly corrected by them photographing every meter and saving the old ones. We've been living with them for about 12 years now. A fair amount of customers had crappy meter bases which failed when they were disturbed after installation. My meter was replaced once because the RF section failed but that did not cause any issue with delivery. When they do have rolling blackouts - and despite media hysteria that's very rare - they don't use the Smart Meter disconnect relay which has a limited number of operations. They do use it for non-paying customers.

I recall a large commercial customer - Walmart - that had a Texas store with a large increase in usage after rollout because the current transformer "CT" multiplier was off in the meter's configuration. One of the super-geek things I've done is use the Smart Meter's "real" power measurement in Watts to compare it to V*A "apparent" power I measure with a clamp-on ammeter. With the bulk of the load being HVAC compressor (at the time I measured) I compute a power factor PF of about 0.75.

If you get one of these installed a tin foil hat is an absolute must-have.


The readings are UTC-6 as the application no longer follows DST. The actual time is UTC-5.
At 4 AM the coffee maker turned on.
At 6:30 the thermostat was turned up by 1°.
At 9 AM the toaster oven was used.
From about 12:30 PM to 8 PM the HVAC was in continuous run. (A 100° day.)
At 3 PM my wife re-heated meatloaf in the "big" oven.
From 10 PM to midnight we cooled the house by 1°.
"They" know absolutely everything we do...

Our heating appliances are natural gas.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I guess I could move this to the brewery, but its already there...
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The discussion about energy consumption during cooking is a fair micro-veer

JR

 

[scott2000]

"They" know absolutely everything we do...

Probably use

https://www.bidgely.com/technology/
ours does and it was a surprise to see an itemized appliance usage that even included entertainment usage..... Things like the Sense energy trackers probably use the same thing....

I knew I mentioned it before...
https://groupdiy.com/threads/deaths-from-climate-change.80281/page-4#post-1043767

 

[57sputnik]

I might add that I pay $61 per MW/h for power and another $40 per MW/h to have it delivered for $101 MW/h total.

When it was 110° and the hub bus average for the generators was fetching around $5000 per MW/h I was as cool as a cucumber and felt like I was getting a good highly-leveraged deal. When the hub bus average drops to $15-25 at times of low load they make a fair profit.

My greatest energy conservation method was shading the AC compressor from direct sun. The drop in current and improvement in performance is significant.

There were a few days when headroom dropped and they called for voluntary conservation and that usually occurred as solar fell off at sunset and wind hadn't picked up. There's a nightly dip in non-renewables and their performance was poor only running at 25% or so of available capacity. On one day there was a frequency event that looked pretty bad - I was monitoring it in realtime - that would have caused load shedding. Solar and wind are inertia-less and that causes grid destabilization as they go offline. Frequency control is the canary in the coalmine.

About 55-58% of the load was fueled by natural gas. Drill baby drill, burn baby burn.

@scott2000 They can use WiFi-based imaging and create 3D object models to look into your home.