The order confirmation is from Prime Day, July 2018: one Instant Pot Duo, 6 quarts, $59. I was pregnant with Eli, Wyatt was three, and I bought it because everyone I knew had one and I was tired of forgetting to soak beans. Eight years later, it's sitting on the counter as I write this, hissing quietly through a pot of red beans for tonight.
Every few years I ask myself whether it still earns its place. This seemed like a good year to ask out loud.
Where it actually lives
For the record, it doesn't live on the counter. Our counter belongs to Matt's coffee maker, the toaster and the fruit basket, and that's all the counter there is. The Instant Pot lives in the corner cabinet next to the stove and comes up four or five times a week. In a kitchen our size, that cabinet is the real estate question.
What it still does every week
I kept a tally on the paper meal plan for four weeks this summer. It came out 17 times, more than I'd have guessed. Here's what it was doing:
- Dried beans, no soaking. Pintos for charro beans, red beans for Thursday red beans and rice, black beans for burrito bowls. A 2-pound bag of pintos is $1.35 at Aldi now, and 45 minutes at high pressure with a natural release turns it into two dinners. This is the main reason I own it.
- Rice. Equal parts rice and water, 4 minutes on high, 10 minutes of natural release. Same result every time, and it doesn't heat the kitchen.
- Hard-boiled eggs, a dozen at a time: 5 minutes on high, 5 minutes of natural release, 5 minutes in ice water. They peel cleanly, which mattered a lot when eggs were $4.67 a dozen and every torn white felt like a loss. They're $2.19 now, and they go into lunches and Wyatt's after-school plate.
- Shredded chicken. Two pounds of breasts for peanut noodles or chicken spaghetti, 10 minutes on high.
- Corn on the cob all summer, six ears standing up in the pot, 2 minutes on high.
- Stock, mostly after Thanksgiving and after any week with a rotisserie chicken carcass. An hour instead of an afternoon.
When I measured it with a plug-in meter in June 2025, a one-hour cycle cost about 6 cents at our old electric rate. I measured again at the end of June on our newer rate and got about 5 cents. It's the cheapest way we cook anything.
What I gave up on
- Yogurt. I made it three times the first year. It took most of a day plus straining, and the boys preferred the tub from Aldi.
- Pasta cooked right in the sauce. Half the time I got the burn warning, and the other half I got gummy noodles. It also makes it impossible to set aside Eli's plain noodles, so spaghetti stays on the stovetop.
- The slow cook button. It runs cooler than our Crock-Pot, and my office-day timing is built around the Crock-Pot, so I ignore it.
- Browning big batches. The pot is too small to brown five pounds of ground beef without steaming it. That job belongs to the big stockpot.
- Cheesecake. It was very good. It was also a cheesecake on a Tuesday, and nobody here needed that.
Eight years of wear
The stainless inner pot looks the same as the day it arrived, except for a faint rainbow stain that comes off with a splash of vinegar. I've replaced the silicone sealing ring twice, about $12 for a two-pack each time, and I keep two going: one for beans and chili, which smells permanently of beans and chili, and one for eggs and rice, which I'd like to keep that way.
My worst moment with it came in 2019, when I poured two cups of broth straight into the base without the inner pot in place. I unplugged it, tipped it out and let it dry upside down in front of a fan for a week. It survived. I consider that luck, not a feature, and I've checked for the inner pot every single time since.
The math: $59 for the pot plus $24 in rings is $83. At roughly 150 uses a year for eight years, that's about 7 cents a use, before the nickel of electricity.
Would I buy it again? Yes, the same basic 6-quart model. I've thought about the 8-quart so I could cook more than two pounds of beans at once, but an 8-quart wouldn't fit the corner cabinet, and the corner cabinet is not up for negotiation. If this one quit tomorrow, I'd have a replacement by Thursday, because Thursdays are red beans.
