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    Sun Solar Cooking: Fail-Proof, Guaranteed Solar Cooking Strategies
    Sun Solar Cooking: Fail-Proof, Guaranteed Solar Cooking Strategies
    Sun Solar Cooking: Fail-Proof, Guaranteed Solar Cooking Strategies
    Ebook184 pages3 hours

    Sun Solar Cooking: Fail-Proof, Guaranteed Solar Cooking Strategies

    By Lee Elliott

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    About this ebook

    How to Solar Cook like a Professional using Fail-Proof, Guaranteed Solar Cooking Strategies
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 12, 2011
    ISBN9781483570648
    Sun Solar Cooking: Fail-Proof, Guaranteed Solar Cooking Strategies

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      Book preview

      Sun Solar Cooking - Lee Elliott

      seafood

      Introduction

      As a child I was infatuated with adventure stories, in any shape or form. My heroes ranged from Asterix and Obelix, terrorizing the poor, downtrodden Romans, and in the process drinking copious volumes of wine and beer, to Tintin, his small dog Snowy and the perpetually dubious Captain Haddock, who as a team fluctuated widely, one minute scouting the dark jungles of the Amazon to the next adventure on some remote outpost on the dark side of the moon.

      Be it Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys or Biggles, my thirst for good, adrenaline-pumping adventure stores remained insatiable. One character who in particular remained a constant source of fascination to me was the indomitable Huckleberry Finn. Maybe it was the curious company he kept, from his lifetime friend Tom Sawyer, to his new-found, surreptitious companion Jim, the runaway slave, or just the assortment of odd people who constantly popped in and out of his life. Either way, in my mind’s eye, I could easily visualize him travelling down the swollen Mississippi River on his raft, contemplating life or at the very least seemingly being able to effortlessly live constantly in the moment, like some loyal cinematic addict glued to the screen of a giant, continuous cinema theater churning out one new movie after the next. Huckleberry Finn moreover was always a participant, never a displaced observer.

      In retrospect probably the only thing that surprises me about Huck is that he seemingly never possessed a solar cooker. I would have naturally just assumed that he would have one, no doubt manufactured at great length and with loving, detailed care, from raw materials undoubtedly bartered for various catfish that he and Tom had pursued and caught with great vigor and excitement on the banks of the Mississippi.

      I can just imagine Tom and Huck catching and skinning catfish, and with gay abandon tossing these huge fish over their shoulders and trudging nonchalantly up to the regular Trading Store to barter and procure the necessary material for the solar cooker. After all what better way to end one their many frenetic days than eating a well-cooked solar meal out of their solar cooker, from the deck of their raft, of course!

      Whist I do not profess to know if Huckleberry Finn ever owned a solar cooker or not, what does continue to surprise me is how long is has taken society to catch on to the concept of renewable energy, be it solar, wind, tidal, geothermal or microbiological. Even more surprising is the level of reluctance displayed by this same society as a whole, to make this next leap of faith.

      Remarkable as it seems, Thomas Edison almost 80 years ago, in 1931, was quoted (in Uncommon Friends: Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel & Charles Lindbergh (1987) by James Newton, p. 31), as saying in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, "We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy – sun, wind and tide…. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that!"

      Historical scenes playing out on CNN of ballooning rivers of crude oil gushing out from damaged oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico tend to reinforce the growing collective perception that fossil fuel energy not only remains unpalatable to the average man and woman on the street, but also simply has a life span. Apart from being ultimately damaging to the environment, as a long-term sustainable solution it is simply morally corrupt.

      Fortunately it seems this perception is shared by some fairly influential people and in this regard on June 15 2010 President Barak Obama in his address to the American people said, amongst many other things, that…

      "For decades we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and time again, the path forward has been blocked-not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor".

      President Obama was talking conceptually of course but his call to action was unmistakable. He of all people must stand firm against this recalcitrance. Having said that, one at last begins to sense an approaching watershed and with it, hopefully, a change of thinking.

      To what degree solar energy will contribute to future endeavors to harness renewable energy remains to be seen, and no doubt it will take a long time for the average housewife to swap her digital electric or gas oven for a solar cooker, especially on overcast and rainy days.

      Coincidentally three months after President Obama’s national address, his Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, on announcing the inauguration of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a new public-private partnership led by the United Nations Foundation (UNF), pronounced "Today we can finally envision a future in which open fires and dirty stoves are replaced by clean, efficient and affordable stoves and fuels all over the world -- stoves that still cost as little as $25. By upgrading these dirty stoves, millions of lives could be saved and improved. Clean stoves could be as transformative as bed nets or vaccines."

      Whilst she admittedly never articulated the concept of solar cooking what is unmistakable is that solar cookers are a prime example, arguably the best practical example, of clean cookstoves.

      Hopefully in the not too distant future, solar cooking will no longer be seen to be the exclusive domain of poor communities living in remote areas of Africa, alternatively some sort of weird, complex pastime to be pursued by passionate, wide-eyed vocal greenies. Hopefully solar cooking and solar cookers will become somewhat more visible, accepted and enjoyed by mainstream society. Hopefully.

      History of Solar Ovens

      Solar ovens (solar cookers) have a rich and surprisingly early history dating right back to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt during the reign of the Pharaoh Ramses II (1279-1212 BC), during which time the Israelites baked their breads from pre-prepared raw dough in solar ovens during their journey through the desert.

      Horace de Saussure, a French-Swiss Physicist, is often accredited with creating the first elementary solar box cooker in 1767, during which time he experimented with trapping the energy of the sun in small, open-bottomed glass boxes (effectively a miniature greenhouse) placed upside down on a black table, to achieve temperatures in excess of 180 degrees Fahrenheit and as a consequence was successful in cooking fruit, .although his devices never achieved any commercial application, despite subsequent design improvements to include pine boxes, wool insulation and endeavors to cook at differing altitudes.

      In 1830 Sir John Herschell, a British astronomer, cooked food in a similar insulated hot box on an expedition to South Africa and in the latter part of the 19th century Augustin Mouchot, a French mathematician, was the first to combine the box heat trap concept and burning mirrors to create a solar oven. He became particularly interested in the solar cooking potential in the French colonies in North Africa and Asia, where there was an abundance of daily sunlight.

      In 1877 Mouchot designed solar ovens for the French military resident in Algeria. He successfully baked bread in 3 hours and subsequently built a separate solar oven to steam vegetables, and tried his hand at shishkabobs in a parabolic cooker. He successfully pasteurized water and wine, and researched a solar device to break down water to its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen.

      In 1876 in India, W. Adams developed an octagonal solar oven with an 8 mirror configuration which effectively cooked food for military personnel in less than 2 hours. In 1884 Dr. Samuel P. Langley, an American astronomer and physicist, and a recognized expert in the field of solar physics, cooked meals atop Mt. Whitney in California using a solar oven.

      Dr. Charles G. Abbot, an American astrophysicist, who went on to become Secretary of the American Smithsonian Institution (1928-1944) , developed a solar cooker in the early 1940s in which the heat collector was outside exposed to the sun but the cooker itself was in the house, with heat transferred from collector to cooker by circulating oil. Conceptually this design allowed the heat to be stored and used to fuel the solar cooker, even when the sun had gone down.

      Solar cooking eventually began to gather some momentum shortly after the second world war, and in the 1950s Dr. Maria Telkes, a scientist at MIT, invented a solar box cooker made from insulated plywood and using a combination of layered glass and flared reflectors. She went on to publish one of the original books on solar cooking, titled Solar Ovens, in 1968.

      In March 1954 the Association for Applied Solar Energy was established and subsequently at the first conference in Phoenix, USA, various early model solar ovens went on display, including parabolic solar ovens and solar box cookers.

      From the late 1950s through to the 1960s the UN made various attempts at broadening the appeal of solar cooking through various initiatives, although limited success was achieved and no long-term sustainable solution was realized. This includes a United Nations Conference in 1961 on New Sources of Energy, which encompassed various solar cooker experts, including Telkes, Löf, Duffie, Pruta and Abu-Hussein.

      In the 1970s the potential of the solar cooking concept was well-recognized and both India and China became more involved at spreading the appeal, especially in light of the ever-increasing trend of deforestation, energy shortages and expanding population growth in both countries. In 1973 China hosted its first conference on solar cooking and in the early 1980s embarked on a program of distributing subsidized solar ovens.

      In the 1970s and through to the 1990s Barbara Kerr and Sherry Cole, two Arizona women, had an extremely positive influence on the solar cooking movement, starting with the design of the EcoCooker, a solar cooker built from a cardboard box. They eventually went on to design a collapsible panel solar cooker (a hybrid design between a box and parabolic solar cooker), the BackPacker, which ultimately was redesigned as the CooKit a commercially built solar oven used all over the world to this day.

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