Solar Oven Designs: Which Kind Is The Best?

In most 3rd world places, where electricity and other fuel sources are hard to come by, solar oven designs have been used. Not only are they effective in cooking food, but also for water purification in sunny countries like Sudan.

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.

Over time many solar oven designs have been mastered, but they generally fall into three main categories: parabolic solar cookers, panel cookers, and box cookers.

Parabolic Design:

A parabolic solar cooker, as the name implies, is made from any reflective material in a parabolic (bowl like) shape that focuses sunlight to a single point. It is the most effective at cooking food quickly and efficiently, however, it tends to be more expensive and hard to make by hand. Furthermore, its fixed shape makes it less portable and raises some safety concerns.

Panel Shape:

Similar to the parabolic design, the panel design focuses sunlight to a single point. However, it is less rounded and made up of a number of small, flat, reflective panels.

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 Shape:

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.

So get started cooking with solar today. There are a number of commercially available solar cookers on the market. Alternatively you can make your own at home by searching online, where a variety of free solar oven designs with full building instructions are provided.

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