Solar Box Cookers

Solar Oven, Take One: FAIL

The first time I ever saw solar cookers was on the news in the summer of 2009 (though that would make it their winter, as I was living in Chile at the time), as part of a development project in the north, which is mostly desert. I had no idea solar cookers were so markedly simple in all various facets, such as appearance, use, and construction, and ever since then, it always remained on my to-do list to make one of my own.

Another added benefit that I was unaware of is that a solar cooker works at any time of year, so long as it's receiving direct sunlight (i.e. not cloudy). The many benefits of this clever creation far outweigh any shortcomings, and the only one I can even think of is that it takes longer to cook, but with a little planning and forethought and perhaps some added engineering/ingenuity, that can easily be overcome.

There are various styles of solar ovens to choose from and each requires a slightly different set of materials. I settled on making what seemed to me the simplest, as the only materials you need are:

More detailed instructions can be found online by doing a search for “homemade solar oven” and choosing whichever design fits your needs and budget best. If you have a pizza box, EERE even has instructions for building a pizza box solar oven —could be a fun project to do with your kids.

I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of the “final product” (which obviously still looked exactly like the initial product as my attempt ended in failure), but I did see some condensation on the plastic wrap, which meant that at least some heat was getting trapped inside my solar oven. I'm not quite sure exactly what went wrong, but I think some of the reasons mine didn’t work were:

Solar cooking in Laveen, AZ - Solar Cooker at Cantinawest

Did you know that everyday the energy equivalent of over 4 trillion barrels of oil fall on the United States in the form of solar energy? Have you ever wondered what we can do with this energy other than heating water and making electricity? How about trying solar cooking?

My wife and I asked ourselves these questions and said, “Hey, why not try solar cooking?” So we did a bit of research on line and found some really neat do-it-yourself solar cookers. We found three types that we could build, parabolic, box cooker and a panel cooker. The panel cooker looked easiest to make, so we did. We built a small solar panel cooker which has reflective Mylar adhered to one side of a cardboard form. This is then placed in the sun with a black pot containing your food inside of an oven bag. We were amazed as we were able to cook a chicken in about an hour and achieve a temperature of over 250 degrees. We have since cooked chili, roasts, ribs, veggies, rice, beans, corn bread, cakes and fish in this simple device. All with the power of the sun and this simple device!


Since our initial success, we have built a box cooker and a parabolic cooker. The box cooker has been our favorite as we don’t have to use the oven bags and any pot will work in it. Our temperatures are around 375 on a sunny Arizona day. We once tried a tri-tip roast and it came out so tender and flavorful our friends could not believe it was solar cooked. Food just tastes better when solar cooked.

One of the most fun projects we did was to mount our heavy box cooker on an old office chair pedestal. This allowed us to set the box at an angle to the sun because of the reclining back rest support. The wheels allow us to push it anywhere in the back yard and it is heavy enough to be stable in the wind. Plus old office chairs are really cheap and are easy to mount a cooker on.


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Greetings Cal,

Thank you very much for such a detailed and infomrative narrative of your solar cooker exploits and the great results!
Your experiences will definitley motivate others to try the same.

I really like it when our visitors go into such detail about their solar cooking experiences, it is so helpful to others who are investigating solar cooking for the first time as well as to the experienced solar cook.

Thank you for the great photos as well, very nice cookers.

Nathan
Admin.

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