apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I remember making one at a science camp one summer. It was an elaborate affair, with a bunch of 8-year-olds cutting out cardboard wedges, covering them with foil and attaching them into a satellite-dish-like shape. Needless to say, it didn't work too well. But I'd be SO psyched to use one that did!

Never used a solar _cooker_, although in an engineering design class, my group built a solar food dryer... it looked a bit like this one:

http://www.appropedia.org/Chris's_ENGR305_Solar_Food_Dehydrator

The basic idea was to design something that could be used in developing countries to dry fish.

Whoa. I've never considered solar cooking viable anywhere but the most desperate of areas, but I'll have to give this thing a try on my porch!

I'd imagine any of these recipes:
http://www.recipe4living.com/Recipes/54-Crockpot.aspx
...would work well with it. Can't wait to give it a shot!

I made one about a year and a half ago, as a way to beat the heat in my kitchen. We had just moved so I used a couple of moving boxes to make the solar oven and I went to the dollar store to buy cheap metal cookware. It worked fine with things like carrots, which were made extra sweet by the long slow cooking with no water. I had a hard time keeping my cardboard solar oven over 215 degrees, so I didn't trust it to cook meat but it cooked vegetables just fine. I ended up using my slow cooker plugged in outside for meat. When we moved into our new home the following spring, I was too busy working on the house to resume use of my solar oven. Now that the days are getting hot again though, I just may resume in a couple of weeks.

I built one last year from the instructions on this page:

http://solarcooking.org/plans/funnel.htm

The project cost less than $10 (thankfully, the neighbors were tossing some huge boxes around that time), and scrounging around thrift stores paid off when I scored some enamel cookware.

Mostly I tinkered with making rice and other grains, but I also cooked some veggies, too. I haven't hauled it out this year yet, so these posts made a great reminder.

It is possible to cook during the colder months, too, as long as you have plenty of sun.

I haven't used a solar cooker, but we do cook rice and beans and such on the stove for a shorter time, then stick it in an insulated box to finish. Saves energy and we can leave the house and not worry about a fire.