What are some harmful things about Solar Cookers?

Question

please feel free to list some disadvantages

Please post links of where you got the info from too.

Please & thankyou

much appreciated

Answer 1

there are no harmful effects of solar cookers

they are a bit slow and you need the sun

it is a matter of convenience and climate ,that is all.

so in many places it is a handy standby cooker

that you use during the day

put the rice and stew in at noon,  and late afternoon it is ready

you have to keep your eye on them if the sunshine is bumpy

I knew someone who made them and he had demonstration at one of our courses

Answer 2

A parabolic mirror can be dangerous to the eyes.

Answer 3

I guess the biggest problem would be under cooking the food if it was meat especially chicken

Answer 4

Solar cookers can fail to maintain an adequate cooking temperature, a temperature that kills bacteria if they are loaded too heavily with food or operated when there is too much cloud cover,

At the other end of the scale, if we leave food in the cooker, get clear bright sky and  have orientation perfect, we can have severely overcooked or burned food.

The variation in heating rates is very significant, so that one can not specify n minutes in a blazing sun. one has to devise feedback mechanisms to know  that the roast is going to be done.

Solar cookers can be designed to heat an oven made of rocks, and have it stay hot for hours after sunset. But some very simple structures are designed to  heat up very quickly and have no residual heat once the sun is gone. The fast heating device is good for breakfast, but only if you wait until the sun is up. The thermal mass oven is good for cooking from about noon, into the evening. If built with lots of insulation they can retain heat through to morning.

Unexpected as this may be, solar cookers often suffer from being too hot, burning the cook not expecting it, and the food.

Ours is a convection oven with a rock base, about 300 kg of rock. This is a bit too heavy to be moved. In  retrospect we might have preferred it to have 30 kg of iron and a set of wheels to move it about.

It does not fit in well with our kitchen. We can get sunshine to it from about 10 am to 3 pm, and that is not enough to keep it hot to  morning.

We get even less sunshine in mid summer. that is a design error.

Answer 5

there are no harmful things about solar cookers...

I don't remember where i've seen this on TV..  about women in Africa who are using it with success