Monday, April 27, 2009

Solar cooker

A solar oven or solar cooker is a device which uses sunlight as its energy source. Because they use no fuel and they cost nothing to run, humanitarian organizations are promoting their use worldwide to help slow deforestation and desertification, caused by using wood as fuel for cooking. Solar cookers are also sometimes used in outdoor cooking, especially in situations where minimum fuel consumption or fire risk are considered highly important.
Alone, each of these strategies for heating something with the sun is fairly ineffective, but most solar cookers use two or all three of these strategies in combination to get temperatures sufficient for cooking.
The top can usually be removed to allow dark pots containing food to be placed inside. The box usually has one or more reflectors with aluminum foil or other reflective material to bounce extra light into the interior of the box. Cooking containers and the inside bottom of the cooker should be dark-colored or black. The inside walls should be reflective to reduce radiative heat loss and bounce the light towards the pots and the dark bottom, which is in contact with the pots.
Solar box cookers can be made of locally available materials or be manufactured in a factory for sale. They range from small cardboard devices, suitable for cooking a single meal when the sun is shining, to wood and glass boxes built into the sunny side of a house.[3] Although invented by Horace de Saussure, a Swiss naturalist, as early as 1767, solar box cookers have only gained popularity since the 1970s. These surprisingly simple and useful appliances are seen in growing numbers in almost every country of the world. An index of detailed wiki pages for each country can be found here.

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