Cooking with the Sun
Posted by dvd on 11 Oct 2008 at 09:31 am | Tagged as: collapse, selfsufficiency, sustainability
The Solar Cooking Archive has collected a large array of various solar cooker designs. They’re low-tech, can be built easily out of fairly common waste from industrial civilisation, and can cook food and pasteurise water without any fossil fuels involved.
Although they do take longer to heat up than a conventional oven (a matter of hours rather than minutes as were used to), and will take longer in temperate climes, they’re worthwhile as if the grid collapsed, having these plans tucked away could be a life-saver.
I can’t reccomend any yet as I can’t vouch for their effectiveness, but the Tyre Stove, soda bottle pasteuriser and the minimum solar box cooker look the simplest to make yet still effective. The Rocket Stove is also worth keeping a design of, as it is an incredibly efficient way to utilise combustion, minimising fuel requirements to twigs and even scraps of cardboard. A Rocket Stove is particularly suitable in climates which get too cold in winter to allow efficient solar cooking.
It would be wise to keep a collection of plans of useful, low-tech and essential pieces of easily constructed kit like these, and even better to practice building them before it becomes an issue of survival. I intend to attempt some of these designs and post the results and my experiences here to guide others. It’s a fun, hands-on way of preparing for collapse and dismantling civilisation!
Solar cooking is a great idea, and so simple.
Probably not much use to me here in the UK – we never seem to have enough sun. For that matter, should ‘push come to shove’ out little island is so overpopulated, that ‘how to cook’ will be the least of our worries for a while I suspect.