How would you like to save some money, electricity, and the environment all at the same time? Here’s a cool way to do this and have some cooked food to show for it! Instead of using a microwave or toaster oven to cook simple foods, build a solar-powered oven and utilize a natural resource available to all of us – sunlight.
Materials You’ll Need
What I like about the solar oven is that you can build it pretty quickly, with materials that are commonly available around the house. Here are the basics, along with a few illustrations, found from the Solar Now website.
- pizza box
- black construction paper
- aluminum foil
- clear plastic
- tape, scissor, and a ruler
- straw
How To Build A Solar-Powered Oven
- Measure and draw a one-inch border around all four sides of the pizza box. Cut along three sides, leaving the side along the back of the box uncut.
- Create a flap by folding along the uncut line to form a crease. Cut a piece of aluminum foil to fit the inside of the flap, and tape the foil onto the flap.
- Measure a piece of plastic to cover the opening you created when forming the flap. The plastic should be larger than the opening, so you can tape it underneath the box top. Make sure the plastic is tightly sealed, so that air won’t escape from the oven interior.
- Cut another piece of foil to line the inside bottom of the pizza box, and tape it into place. Then cover the foil with black construction paper, and tape it into place again.
- Close the pizza box, and prop open the flap of the box with a straw. Put the box in sunlight, and adjust the aluminum flap until it reflects the most sunlight through the plastic window and into the oven.
Important Points To Note
Many solar ovens will reach temperatures between 200 and 275 degrees. While this is sufficient to cook many types of foods, it’ll take awhile longer too cook than with traditional ovens. But a nice benefit of this is that solar ovens don’t easily burn food. So you can leave your food in the oven while you go to work, and come home to food that’s warm and ready to eat!
And in the event that electricity isn’t available, you can use the solar oven to purify water and cook food. This can even make a cool science experiment. It reminds me of something MacGyver would’ve created back in the day!
To see how you can build many other types of solar ovens, check out the Solar Cooking Archive.
Do you think the concept of a solar oven is cool? Would you build one yourself?
Photo by Abri_Beluga
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