Cooker Safety

Fire is always a grave hazard on a boat and all possible steps should be taken to prevent this. Your cooker is a major source of heat and you’ll need to protect the boat from it. Cookers are manufactured to a standard (EN 30) that requires the temperature of the metal surface on the side panels does not 60^oC above the ambient temperature and that any surface that is normally exposed to flexible hoses does not exceed 70^oC.

The heat from the hotplate is not so easy to regulate as the heat a surface is exposed to will vary depending on the size of a pan put on the burner. For this reason the Standards (BS5482:3 & EN ISO 10239) lay down minimum separation distances between a cooker and the surrounding surfaces. As a guide, unprotected combustible materials should not be placed 400mm above a cooker for horizontal surfaces when the vessel is at rest and 200mm when the boat is healed to 30^o.

For vertical surfaces, the cooker should be separated by 125mm horizontally. In addition, hanging textiles such as curtains should not be fitted within 600mm of the cooker.As the cooker seat is unlikely to be exposed to temperatures in excess of 125^oC, you could line it with Formica, as it’s easy to keep clean, while the surfaces level or above the hotplate should be protected by stainless sheet. A side cheek fitted to the sea rail would give added protection.