Lazy Daze Owners' Group

I love my stove top for morning coffee and breakfast. I have only used the oven in cold weather. Most of my cooking is done outside. I have a small charcoal grill, a small gas grill that I in me use if charcoal is not permitted. I especially mike using the dutch oven.

The first two pictures I used a charcoal grill. The last picture of ribs cooked in a dutch oven in the fire pit.

"I dislike RV ovens because they are small and hard to light. I really dislike having to get down on my knees to light a stove and as I am getting older it is getting harder to get up."

I'm with you there! As mentioned, the Force 10 marine stoves I've owned light the oven with the push of a button mounted on the panel with the knobs (via an electronically generated high-voltage spark, similar to what ignites an RV furnace or water heater), so that annoyance is avoided. But given how little you bake in a conventional oven, it's probably not worth the fifteen hundred dollars it would cost to replace the RV stove that comes with your Lazy Daze. I think Larry's idea of removing the stove and replacing it with a countertop and cupboard or drawers sounds like a better fit for your needs.

"The other thing I have been thinking about are portable power stations and the possibility of utilizing said power station to power an Air Fryer."

I see a couple of drawbacks to that approach. First, air fryers draw anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 watts. If you get one of the smaller fryers, you could run it from one of the larger 1,500 watt-hour portable power stations, but that would cost you about $1,600. And unless you need to be able to cook in a tent, why buy a portable battery pack rather than upgrading the house batteries your RV already has?

Second, and more important, since power stations don't make power--they merely store it--that power has to come from somewhere. In other words, you'd need to recharge the power station. Unless you had a large solar panel array (400-600 watts or more), that would take a long time. As for the 100-200 watt suitcase-style solar panels often sold with these power stations... those would take forever to replenish 1,500 watt-hours.

If you really want to cook with electricity, the most cost-effective way is to follow Jan's example: lots of solar panels charging lots of house batteries, powering a big multi-thousand-watt inverter. The advantage is, of course, no propane use. The disadvantage is the high cost. The batteries had better be lithium; lead-acid batteries--even AGMs--do NOT like huge power drains. I had five high-quality Lifeline AGM batteries in my midbath, but when I ran my microwave oven from my 2,000 watt inverter, it drew 130 amps from those batteries, and that really strained them. Lithium (LiFePO4) batteries cost more, but they can stand up to heavy loads.

The bottom line is that while it's possible to cook with electricity while boondocking, doing so requires a substantial investment in solar panels (five or six, if you can fit them), batteries (four or five of them, and lithium instead of AGM), a different charging system to keep the lithium batteries happy, a large inverter, and major wiring upgrades to handle the massive currents that inverter will be drawing. (We're talking about cable approximately the diameter of garden hose, at about ten bucks per foot--see photo--plus matching lugs.) And, need I add, labor--unless you're prepared to do all your own electrical rework, as Jan and her partner did, and as I have done.

It's a lot easier to stick with propane.

So again, I like Larry's idea: pull out the stove, wrap it up neatly and store it. Replace it with a countertop, a single or double propane burner, and a cabinet or drawers below that... but do it so that you can swap the original stove back in when it comes time to resell. Use your Omnia oven on the stovetop on the rare occasions when you need to bake.

That's my, um, three cents worth. :-)