Solar Oven
Sun energy can be used directly to cook your meals. Solar oven, a.k.a. solar cooker works in countries with sunny and dry season. The closer you are living to the equator the better it will work. Unlike the solar heating panels solar ovens need no high technology to manufacture so they are not expensive and enable a lot of people to use them.
There are some types of solar oven. The first one is parabolic solar cooker. Parabolic solar cooker cook fast at high temperatures. It can cook as well as conventional oven but is difficult to construct due to its curvy shape. Frequently adjustment is needed to allow this concentrator get a full exposure to the sunlight. Because this type of solar oven can reach quite a high temperature you need to put extra caution when operating it. You can see a movie of somebody cooking with this parabolic solar oven here:
The second type is the solar box cooker; the most commonly used ones in many countries. Although a solar box cooker can’t reach high temperature as a standard oven will do it is still hot enough to cook meals over a longer period of time. Bigger box can accommodate multiple cooking pots inside. Because the temperature will never be too hot it is safe to leave the food inside the box cooker all day. The cooker temperature is also suitable to pasteurize milk or drinking water.
A panel cooker combines the box and curved concentrator (parabolic) cooker. Panel cookers are very cheap. You can even make one for yourself by pasting reflective materials onto a corrugated cardboard box. They can be used to cook food and pasteurize milk. To keep the heat inside the cooking pot a high temperature plastic bag is needed to insulate it. The plastic bag should be clipped or sealed and kept from touching the hot cooking pot.
Because solar oven is fueled by sunlight it is extremely important that you use black pots instead of other colored pots. Black color will absorb almost all of the sun’s light and turn it into heat, substantially improving the effectiveness of the cooker. Also, the better a pan conducts heat, the faster the oven will work.
the SolarCost Admin
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