Solar cooking?

Question

anyone doing solar cooking? tell me about it

Answer 1

no it sucks

Answer 2

We used to use a solar oven... really just a box at the top of a light sheet metal pipe, about 4 metres long that had a parabolic aluminum foil mirror to focus sunlight on the pipe. The pipe had a flap at the top to restrict the amount of air flow, so that instead of having a large flow of warm air we could have a low flow of hotter air. The flap was opened and closed by a bi-metal thermostat that allowed us to set a desired temperature and maintain it through the cooking period.

It would heat to  200C in a few minutes in clear sky.

We would have the pipe and reflector lie down with oven   30 to 50 cm higher than intake end.

The pipe would be oriented east west, so that one need not reorient it during cooking. But it has to be tilted to get the sun hit the pipe, based on the day of the year.

We get a lot of cloudy weather, and our design worked very well only during sunny weather. It did not work very well early in the day, as before 9am, or after about 5pm. To make the oven work very quickly when there was good sun, we had not made the oven a brick covered and insulated box that would have stayed hot for hours.

We did borrow one like that for a while,  it would not be hot before 10AM but would cook well into the evening.

A problem, we sometimes took food out of the oven undercooked or overcooked, because temperature control would not compensate for a big cloud passing over.

Answer 3

Here is a solar cooking yahoo group; lots of good info.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SolarCooki...

I made one, I have a friend who made a big one.

I cooked eggs and sausage.

Last month a friend cooked a nice chicken dinner for four.