I can’t count the number of times I’ve ruined a meal with overcooked rice. Spending hours home cooking a curry and then messing up the rice in the final few minutes. That’s why I invested in a rice cooker to do the job perfectly every time. If you’ve got one of these machines, you’re probably interested in its power consumption. We’re all becoming more conscious about how much energy we’re using. This could be because you’re worried about utility bills or spending time off-grid in an RV.
Below we will discuss and test rice cooker power req and wattage, explain how to work it out for yourself, and calculate the total electricity required.
How Many Watts is a Rice Cooker?
The average rice cooker uses between 350 and 700 watts.
The exact number depends on the size and model of your rice cooker. For example, a small personal machine uses 350W while large family cookers draw 700W or more when running on high power.
The reason your rice cooker has such as which req is because it needs to boil water and keep it hot while cooking your rice. As you can imagine, the bigger the cooker the more power it needs to get up to temperature. Fortunately, it will only be cooking for 20 minutes so overall energy usage is not too big. Plus, the power rating is when the appliance is heating up and running on high. You could reduce power consumption by operating on a lower setting, of course, this depends on what you are cooking.
How to Find Out Your Rice Cooker Wattage
There are 3 ways you can work out the wattage of a rice cooker.
- Check Product Specification
The quickest way is to look at the rice cooker’s specification. The watts (W) is usually written on a sticker on the base of the appliance. If not, you can check the user manual or the manufacturer’s website for technical details.
- Use a Wattmeter
A wattmeter is brilliant for getting a live wattage reading and tracking total energy usage of any appliance. You can simply plug it into your rice cooker to get instant information.
I used one to test a rice cooker which gave a live reading of 472W.
- Wattage Formula or Calculator
If you know the amperage and voltage of your rice cooker you can use this to find the running watts. Simply use the formula Amps x Volts = Watts. Or you can head over to the ‘Watt Calculator’ to work this out.
Rice Cooker Wattage Examples
Let’s take a look at specific examples of how many watts a rice cooker draws. Below is a collection of modern rice cookers with their listed power ratings.
| Rice Cooker Model | Power Rating (Watts) |
| IMUSA Nonstick Rice Cooker | 500 |
| SQ Electric Automatic Rice Cooker | 400 |
| SQ Professional Blitz | 900 |
| TEFAL Cool Touch | 700 |
| Breville Rice Cooker and Steamer | 700 |
| Cookworks 1.5L Rice Cooker | 500 |
| Russell Hobbs 19750 Rice Cooker | 700 |
| Lakeland Digital Rice Cooker | 500 |
| Yum Asia Panda Mini Rice Cooker | 350 |
As you can see, the power ratings vary between different rice cookers. So you should take the time to check your own appliance.
How Much Electricity Does a Rice Cooker Use?
You can use rice cooker wattage to work out how much electricity it uses. Plus this can be useful in understanding how much it costs to run your rice cooker.
A watt (W) is a measurement of power at a single point in time. A watt-hour is the total amount of electricity used in an hour. For example, a rice cooker drawing 700W would use 700Wh when running for an hour.
Happily, electricity bills are recorded in kilowatt-hours (kWh). A kilowatt is simply 1000 watts. So a 700W rice cooker running for 1 hour uses 0.7kWh.
In reality, you use a rice cooker for 20 minutes each time. This means a rice cooker uses about 233Wh or 0.233kWh electricity per use. So if you cook rice 10 times a month, that’s 2.33kWh a month and 28kWh a year.
That’s an electricity cost of $0.34 a month or $4.19 a year when cooking rice a couple of times a week.
Using a Rice Cooker Off-Grid
If you’re planning to use your rice cooker in an off-grid situation like a power outage, RV, boat, semi-truck, or similar, the information above is important. It enables you to pick the correct power products and know how long you can run everything.
You can either use a power inverter, portable power station, or generator to generate electricity.
To make sure everything runs smoothly you should check two things on this equipment – wattage capacity and total energy capacity.
Your power source, like an inverter, should have a wattage capacity of at least 20% more than your rice cooker. This ensures it will be able to deliver enough power as they are never 100% efficient. To cook rice, you will need at least 1000W of power capacity. This will give you enough to run most machines without overworking them. If you have a small portable rice cooker then you could reduce this to around 500W capacity.
Secondly, you need to ensure your energy source, like a battery, has enough energy to run the rice cooker for the required amount of time. As we already know, it could use about 233Wh of electricity for each usage. This is the equivalent to 19.4Ah on a 12V battery.
How Many Watts Does a Rice Cooker Use Summary
I hope you now have a clear understanding of how many watts a rice cooker uses.
These are mid-powered kitchen appliances that will use a noticeable amount of electricity when in operation. That being said, you’ll only be running it for 20 minutes so this means overall efficiency to cook rice is pretty good. Adding to this, you probably won’t be using it every day (unless you love rice!). If you’re planning on using one in an RV or similar off-grid scenario then it won’t kill your batteries to make dinner.
