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What do you think is the best choice : DIY solar oven or buy one to professionnals ?
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You should specify the location and who the users will be - 3rd world or in France. It makes a very big difference![SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] -
How does location make a difference to weather you buy one or build one?? And how does the it matter who is the end user.?
You mean if if its going to be used by Lady Whatnot in Mayfair it has to be professionally built so it looks ok next to the Bentley on the estate? but if its to be used by a Zulu in the middle of Africa it ok if it made from old packing boxes ?
Solar cookers have been used successfully at the base camps of mt everest. I dont know if they were all professionally designed and built or put together by Mongolian monkeys from parts from a chev corvair. Mabe some of each. ??Comment
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Think a bit - If a solar oven is the only means of cooking it is one thing - if it is a toy then it is quite another thing. The climbing expeditions would be a perfect use. They will have labor plenty to carry it all and do the cooking - no problem.
Somewhere I saw that even using the cooker for one meal a day saves soooo much pollution - whoopee but it don't really work that way - getting people to change over would not be easy. Maybe 90% of people wouldn't have a nice sunny balcony to set the thing on - there is a shortage of sunny balconies in most slums and forests too for that matter.
If it is going to be used by your Zulu in SA or Indian peasant then it can be made of what ever works.
Nice country club thing though.[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]Comment
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Imho
I think that for what they charge for anything that they can say is "Green", you should definetly go the DIY route. Now you must keep in mind that this is coming from me and I have enough materials in my shop and the skill to build one right now. Now maybe you don't hoard building material like I do and need to purchase everything off the shelf. Maybe it would just be easier for you to buy one premade.
I would like to make one but I have small children and couldn't leave it unattended. I trust my kids not to touch it, but I don't trust their freinds.Comment
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there is a shortage of sunny balconies in most slums and forests too for that matter.This is the point . Because the forests have been cut down for cooking firewood. Women have to now walk miles from their villages to find firewood. Believe it or not there are now thousands of solar cookers in use mostly in India and Africa. No one is suggesting someone is going to set one up at the local Hilton Hotel balcony.
As for saying you cant leave one unattended because you have children makes no sense. They are no more dangerous than your usual electric or gas stove. In fact they are less dangerous. as they cant get to the temperature that a gas or electric stove can if a control is turned on fully and left unattended. Solar ovens/cookers need some turning every half hour to reorient them If not done the oven will lose heat and then would be in failsafe mode. The only solar cookers that can be dangerous are the over 6ft dia parabolic reflectors .They can produce temperatures of over 1000 deg F in seconds.
No great carpentry skills are needed to make a simple box with a glass top and simple flat sided reflectors covered with reflective metal.or mirrors. There are many many web sites that give all the information needed to build simple solar ovens/cookers..Comment
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It makes sense to me. My stove is in my kitchen, and I can see my Kitchen from my living room. I have 3 children. There is almost always at least one playing in my backyard at any given time. I can keep an eye on my indoor stove, but to have to sit outside while the Sun slowly cooked my food wouldn't work so well.
That being said I really want to try one just to test the concept. Just today i was testing a small solar widow heater and was getting 165F air out of it with 77F ambient air going in today. I was suprised to get that high a temp from a small design.Comment
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I still cant see how it can be anywhere near as dangerous as a gas or electric stove.. A gas or electric stove has either flames or a very red hot element that is easily touched on the top of the stove,saucepans containing boiling fluids can easily be pulled off the stove by the handles in a split second,far faster than you could get from living room to kitchen.And its not possible to be sitting watching the kitchen from living room every second.
Now a solar oven has the pots enclosed in the oven ,difficult to remove or be spilt by children. and the oven height would be abour 4ft above the ground. well above a small childs ability to remove the pot.
The outside of a solar oven is not above any other item left out in the sun. the only external part that gets hot is the glass cover and that is almost impossible to reach for a child because of their necessaty to be 2 ft high.. and are above the 4ft height of the oven above ground.
A reasonably well made oven using cheap materials well get to over 400deg F inside,as I already said, more than enough to cook anything.Comment
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In 2009, China led the world with over 1.4 million solar thermal cookers.
India has developed solar thermal institutional systems which cook for
thousands of people.
The Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) has
registered eight solar cooker
projects in China since 2009. A total of 207,000 parabolic
cookers have been
distributed, serving 848,000
people.
In 2005, GTZ, the German international assistance organization, did a
survey of household fuel consumption in the Tibet Autonomous Region,
(TAR). It found that families spent a large part of their income and time
obtaining fuel. At altitudes above 3700 meters, the daily fuel is one or two
bags of yak dung collected most days by the women in 3 to 9 hour forays
throughout the dry season. At lower altitudes, very poor women carried
wood from distant mountain valleys, walking up to 10 hours a day during
the collecting season. Others bought wood delivered by tractors.
GTZ reported that by 2007, 70,000 solar cookers were in use in the TAR.
By 2009, around 50,000 cast iron solar cookers were sold annually. 100
shops making concrete solar cookers were found in Qinhai Province and a
new factory was operating in Lhasa. Regular use of solar cookers reduced
consumption of wood and yak dung by half.
In India, CDM registered a Gold
Standard project in 2006.
Gadhia Solar company created
institutional kitchens with arrays
of large parabolic solar
concentrators to generate
steam. Such an installation at
Mt. Abu, Rajasthan, can produce
meals for 38,500 pilgrims per
day.
As you can see the use of solar cooking is not just a few do gooders from the country clubs giving a few hand outs to poor people ..Comment
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Do you have children? Or cook? Lol. I wouldn't stovetop cook from my livingroom. I love to cook btw I'm right in the kitchen lovin' it the whole time. I was refering to the oven. I was just saying when the oven is on I'm better able to monitor it than if it were outdoors. That's all.
GreenComment
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Nothing wrong with the solar cookers - I am saying that
1) They are good for limited hours of the day
2) Limited locations
The numbers from do-gooder organizations are always suspect - country club numbers tend to include thoughts and wishes in the totals.
Locations using a solar concentrator to generate steam are a different animal and should not be included.[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]Comment
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1) They are good for limited hours of the day
2) Limited locations
What locations cant they be used? excluding high rise buildings
limited hours can be extended easily and at little cost by adding bricks or metal mass into the oven .
There have been made ones that have enough heat retaining mass to still be able to cook next morning.
Even if you do not count solar heated steam used for cooking (but I cant see that that is valid) there is still a huge number of direct solar cookers in use and the figures I gave is only some of the known numbers.Comment
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I was sus about solar cookers of any type until I actually built a parabolic reflector one from scratch . it took about a week. it was 4ft dia but it was hard to use as the focal point is only a 1/2 sq in. And one day it burnt a hole through my 1/4 in thick aluminium pot. It also needed to be adjusted to track the sun every 15 minutes.
Next one was oven 18in sq and aluminium foil reflectors. Box was not made to close enough tolerance and lost a lot of heat around the door and single pane glass. Only got to about 280 deg F .. tooooo sloooow.
My present one 30 in long and 18 in wide and 30in high mirror reflectors and 3in insulation between inner and outer box and double pane glass easily gets to over 400 deg F. and has ceramic floor tiles to retain heat for up to 2 hrs after sun down. Cooks as fast as gas oven or stove. And only needs sun adjusting about every 30 mins..
Build one it doesn't cost much and they are a lot of fun and a good talking piece for your visitors, as they save money on gas/electricity. We cook lunch and dinner most days with it.Comment
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Country club stuff for sure - in the cities how are the poor going to manage this? Most slums in Bombay (now Mumbai due to politics) would have little exposure to the sun - I have been there. To add enough thermal mass to have heat the next morning you are talking about something far beyond the average peasant plus it would be a heat radiator during the day.
I wasn't going to comment on this any more but this is too good - go to the big cities around the world one time and learn what you are talking about rather than repeating what someone else has said.
Can the solar cookers be used? Yes but with rather limited application in most areas.[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]Comment
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Russ I have filled up 2 passports in the last ten years and quite a few in the previous 30 yrs...I think it is safe to say I have seen just about every squaller and slum area in most countries.. And if there are some I have missed its not important I have seen enough.
Its not expensive to make bricks that are adequate to keep an oven hot for hours.
its useless trying to explain this to you as you obviously have never used a good solar oven . but it may inspire others to give it a try as they have nothing to lose as it costs very little to build one. and they may actually have fun building and using one.Comment
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