I love this idea, and am gonna make it. Solar oven
But I wonder if either covering the board with tin foil or painting it a flat black would decrease the cooking time?
The unit itself is cheap, so no great loss if it doesn’t work, though see no reason that it would not. I’m going to play around with using some old cast iron pots along with the aluminum. My thought being they would hold the heat longer than the aluminium
Another question along the same line, will a cd or dvd reflect heat as well as light? Could those be for heat/reflection for board on this unit if the tin foil worked better than the light absorbing black paint?
MizTina, you’d get more and better-quality responses if you posted a link to the unit in question. The formatting for that is [URL=___]link text name[/ URL].
Ooh, I see. Interesting… I had assumed you’d found a low-priced reflective parabolic dish.
Umm, given the slow cooking time, I’d avoid trying anything that would readily give you food poisoning. Maybe something like Rice Chex snack mixes, or something.
Re. the cast iron question, I’d try lighter pots first. You want to transfer as much of the heat energy to the food as possible, as quickly as possible, and cast iron has an enormous heat-storage capacity in its own right.
As for paint, I wouldn’t paint any cookware. Just buy a pot or pan that’s enameled black to begin with… and paint your board black, instead.
I understand the concerns about the slow cooking time. But I don’t believe there is solar cooker that works quickly. This site Solar cooking safety address those issues sufficiently. My one and only bout of Bangkok belly was quite enough for me.
And as for the painting the pot, no way would I attempt that, not with Goodwill and Salvation Army stores and their great variety of used black pots and pans.
She’s asking about painting the board, not the pot.
This cooker is basically just an application of the greenhouse effect. The reason a greenhouse works is that energy from the Sun is absorbed mostly through visible light, but the objects thus heated release energy mostly through infrared light. Glass is (of course) transparent to visible light, but not so much to infrared, so the energy ends up trapped in the greenhouse, raising the temperature.
If you paint the board black, it will absorb all of the sunlight which hits it, and give up that energy only through infrared, which is easily trapped. If the board is any color other than black, then some of the light which hits it will not be absorbed, but will be reflected directly back as still-visible light, which will escape the glass. If the board is covered with aluminum or other reflective material, or painted pure white, then almost all of the light which hits it will be reflected still-visible, and be lost, with almost none of it being converted to the easily-trapped infrared.
Thank you very much! Flat black is what I will use for the board. In the interest of recycling and frugality, will clear plexiglass work as well as glass?
