Hook a $100-ish PID controller up to the rice cooker. (Personally I hook it up to a crockpot but, more or less, same difference--some say a big rice cooker is actually better for this than a crock pot.) You do of course, need, a vacuum sealer as well although you can experiment with ziplocks that you've squeezed the air out of.

I'm actually not really a sous vide religious convert. But I did put together a setup and, for certain types of food, it's actually really convenient.

How do you circulate the water?

You don't need to circulate the water in a rice cooker. You do get more variation in temperature than you would get with a real circulator, but it's not enough to matter unless you're doing fussy egg cooking. For most cooking, a noncirculated rice cooker water bath worked just great for me.

Convection vs. circulation. The heat comes from the bottom with rice cookers and crockpots.

Aquarium pumps work quite well, but it is not strictly necessary.

I'm going to have to try this because why not?

They sell 1 brand of SV machine for 180ish on amazon, and another for 350-500.

> A good poly-science costs what, $700?

Rather expensive, then, for most of the world.

The only people who really need Polyscience circulators are restaurants and food service professionals. The advantage of the Polyscience circulator over the $200-$300 alternatives (or the $100-150 Auber DIY setups, or the $50-75 full DIY setups) is mostly volume. If you need to queue up 100 servings of protein every day, the cheap setup isn't going to cut it, and also poses HACCP issues.

I use an Auber PID [1] with a crockpot. I "vacuum" seal by submerging food in ziploc baggies in a sink full of water. It all works fine, I've never felt like I needed to drop hundreds of dollars on fancy equipment.

[1] http://www.auberins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&...

I still do the ziploc thing. It's fraught, but worth it for the convenience.