(or, how I built a solar oven)
Recently, I had to do a project of my choosing for Permaculture class. My friend Jessica and I decided to build a solar oven out of cardboard and other cheap materials, just to see how much it would cost and what the outcome would be (i.e. could we actually cook anything in it?). This is the how-to guide that we used:
“Minimum” Solar Box Cooker
Here are the results. This is a PDF version of our PowerPoint presentation:
The Cardboard Solar Oven Project
Building A Cheap Solar Oven
And this is a short paper that I wrote about solar cooking in general:
Cooking With Free Solar Energy
In the end, it didn’t bake the bread as we had hoped. Maybe we just didn’t leave it in there long enough, or perhaps it was just too cold outside when we tried. But it did give me hope that a serious effort to build a solar oven — using wood, glass, insulation, and proper reflectors — will succeed. I definitely think that solar ovens have the potential to cook a large portion of the food that we now prepare with fossil fuels (either directly or indirectly).
If you are interested in this topic, be sure to check out the solar cooking wiki linked below. It is packed with information and advice.
The Solar Cooking Archive Wiki
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Three weeks ago Ben and I went to a local meetup to hear a talk on several residential solar hot water heating systems. We were presented with information about three different systems and were shown data on the costs, efficiency, and temperature averages of the hot water (dependent on climate).
The cost range for the systems presented was between $2k and $6k, and the presenters agreed that the average non-batch closed loop system for a typical home costs around $6k. (I believe this includes a backup system.) The least expensive system that was discussed (~$2k) was a passive system, which was basically a solar oven collecting the water on the roof.
Each of the residents had different goals and budgets to work with, but all had a backup electrical system running in the case of several cloudy days in a row. Ben and I are both of the opinion that overall, people generally prefer hot water on-demand at any point in the day and in any amount, which is why they require a backup system. It would be nice to opt out of a such a system, not only because we balk at using fossil fuels for this project, but also because we’re embracing the changes in our daily routine that we will be necessary to make if our hot water is in limited supply.
The US Department of Energy explains the different types of systems pretty well and provides resources for further reading.
EERE Consumer’s Guide: Solar Water Heaters
Darrell Edgley was one of the presenters at the meetup. He is experimenting with all sorts of resource-saving methods at his home in Durham, NC, and records data from his solar hot water system daily. (Scroll down and click the “solar data” link.)
Darrell Edgley’s Solar Data
The information we took in from the meetup was valuable in that we were introduced to solar hot water heating and heard some good discussion on mechanical and cost differences between the three systems. I’ll be writing more about solar hot water heating once we begin to make some decisions on our budget for the water system.
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