Cooked
6 Comments Published October 20th, 2008 in Color Country Information, Southern Utah Talking Points and Questions.Our solar oven really works, but it also tells me something else.
We’re going as green as we can get here in Color Country. A few months ago, we added a clothes line to avoid using our power-gulping dryer. Recently, we added a solar oven to avoid our power-gulping oven.
It works great!
Here in Color Country, when the sun shines hot and strong, our oven will crank up to 400 degrees in about the same time it would take our electric oven to get that hot. We’ve cooked chili, baked potatoes, squash, bread. My wife worked as a chemist and knows a thing or two about food chemistry. We both think things actually taste better cooked in our solar oven.
As nearly as we can calculate it, we figure our oven will pay for itself in about two years just in the cost of power. After that, it’s gravy.
Here’s a free plug for the store where we bought it:
Your Family Still Matters
175 West 900 South
Suite 14
St. George
435-628-7042
It’s in that little maze of strip mall stores on the north side of Bluff Street a few blocks east of the freeway. It’s an interesting store. In addition to solar ovens, they also sell paintball equipment and survival stuff. It’s the kind of store that’s fun to wander around in anyway.
The amazing thing to me is how hot that thing gets. Check out the shadow in the picture. The only energy it gets is a few square feet of sunshine. But that’s enough to heat it up to 450 degrees on a good day. It’s an impressive concept to realize that this energy is heating up every surface on half the Earth all of the time.
And that has refocused my mind on global warming. Because the principal that heats up that little oven and the one heating up the Earth are just about the same. The reason the oven gets hot is that the energy in the sun’s rays are converted into heat by the dark surfaces in the oven and get trapped there. The reason the Earth is getting hot is the same with the single difference that the way the heat is trapped is different.
The impressive thing is just how much heat is involved. I look at a pot of beans bubbling away in my solar oven and then think of that much heat multiplied by every little square yard of sunshine over half of the surface of the Earth. That’s a lot of heat!
It helps you appreciate how even a small change could turn our green Earth into the planet Mercury where lead melts on the surface of the planet.
Clotheslines and solar ovens are great — when there is sun. I’d like to “go green” and “not gulp power” also, but without sun six months of the year, my payback time on the solar oven would be years and years. And clotheslines just aren’t practical and just plain don’t work when there is a foot of snow on the ground.
What can those of us in climes not blessed with much sun for six (and more) months of the year do? Any suggestions?
Dan , You blog was very interesting but with the rest of us there are a lot of questions. I have never seen a solar oven and want to know…What are the four sides made of…polished aluminum , I think not mirrors because I think whatever it is would need to be convex ? Are the dark sides (areas) the sides next to the container of beans ? How can you tell how hot your oven is ? Do you just hold a thermomenter in it…above it . Poor fingers ? Does it make a difference where you place your oven ? South side ..east side .
And yes I do know the answer to Peggy’s question . Move .
Last question…Can I a poor retired teacher afford an oven ? your mother
To Peggy …
Bull Pucky! We used a clothesline when we lived where you do. It mainly takes a little planning and the desire to actually do something.
But I have to admit that we’ve always had a backup dryer for those really difficult days, so you have to justify a clothes line based on the actual savings in power on those days when you can use it. Fortunately, that’s MOST days – even where you live.
To Mom …
“Can I, a poor retired teacher, afford an oven?”
First, I corrected your punctuation.
Second, nope. You’ll have trouble scraping together enough crumbs for a whole crust of bread.
Third, don’t tell Peggy to move. I like her fine where she is!
The sides look like stainless steel to me. The entire inside is finished with what looks like flat black paint. This oven comes with a thermometer attached just under the glass. Yes, it makes a big difference where you put it. And you should go out and reorient it about every half hour as the sun moves.
I was raised in a Utah town at 6,500 feet elevation. I remember bringing in clothes from the clothesline in the winter — they would be frozen as stiff as a board, but when they thawed they would be quite dry.
OK. So you two have “solved” the clothesline problem. But I certainly would get hungry before the beans got cooked were I to use the solar oven! Any solution to that — since Dan doesn’t want me to move?
We don’t use our oven every day, but it works surprisingly well even when there isn’t full sun. We cooked some squash recently when it was slightly overcast. The temperature didn’t get over 375, but that was plenty to cook the squash.