Solar Oven Designs To Use At Home
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by: TimMcDonald | Total views: 96 | Word Count: 487
For ages solar cookers were made use of in 3rd world countries where electricity and gas was not readily available. Nowadays various solar oven designs are not only used in these regions to make food, but also to boil water for purification.
And like other solar technologies, there's no reason first world countries should not promote solar cooking at home to help save energy. Although cooking may take four times longer than conventional ovens, no electricity or fuel is used - just the power of the sun.
A number of interesting solar oven designs have been made over the years, but they typically take one of three forms: parabolic design, panel design, or box design.
Parabolic Solar Cooker:
As the name suggests, a parabolic cooker is made from reflective material that is molded into bowl. This helps it concentrate the sunlight in one area and effectively cook your food. However, this design typically costs more and it's rigid structure makes it less practical for traveling.
Panel Design:
A panel cooker is any cooker made with a series of flat, reflective panels arranged to direct sunlight to a focal point.
The panel shape is not as efficient as the parabolic shape, but it has the advantage of being foldaway, portable, and rather simple to make. These cookers can be found in a number of interesting deigns, but the simplest is by far the one made by folding one of those reflective windscreen blinds.
Box Cooker:
The final shape is the box cooker. The concept behind this solar oven design is very different to the parabolic and panel cookers. Here, the cooker works by absorbing sunlight through perspex, trapping that sunlight and heat in the cooker, and creating more heat as more light streams in.
What makes the box cooker appealing is that is really easy to make - the simplest design requires a cardboard box, a piece of clear glass or plastic, and tin foil - and it can cook a large portion of food at a time.
In fact most of these solar oven designs can be made from household materials in a short space of time. And what you can cook in them is really limited to your imagination - you can bake bread, steam vegetables, make stir-fries and even a roast chicken in them. Another advantage is the amount of power you'll save - unlike a conventional oven, your cooker needs to be outside to operate, so it put less strain on your kitchen's air conditioning system.
And if you think that over 75% of American households use their oven or stove on a daily basis - a tremendous amount of energy could be conserved if more of us used solar oven designs during summer.
There really is no excuse for not looking more into solar cooking. With a number of affordable solar cookers and free instructions available on the internet, you owe it to yourself, your kids and the environment to try one out for yourself.
About the Author
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