solar cookers whether the newesttechnologies around maybe a minute by a power outage alreadythis year for you just concerned about the hurricanes will come are you acamper wanna be able to cook on the trail free trying to cut down theirelectricity bills or do you just want to keep the housecourse through the long hot days for the summer all those are good reasons for solarcooker now we're gonna make one today we've got
easily available materials here butfirst we're going to show you some other newer varieties that you can buy if you want to just go out and get onethis is one model this is from so workers international what's called acoquette and obviously we're not promoting anyparticular brands these are just two of the many that are available on themarket its adjustable so you can move this downor said it up depending on the angle of the sun andyou just use a paper clothespin or some kind of a clip toadjusted
you need a small part because this isopen and exposed to the air you use a up in bag and you just canchit chat with a paperclip or something like that and why youwouldn't do this if you are cooking because these get very heart you do need to have some kind of iraqand i just use a couple with jar lids on the bottom to hold the pay on up ofthe stove but this is your stove in all you do is change the angle to follow the sun ifit's a good hot bright sunny day and you put it out it
eleven o'clock you could bake browniesand hereby noon or 12:30 less on or you have more food inhere you could be cooking in here for eighthours chicken and vegetables chicken and rice spreads you can cook just about anythingin this one and it is collapsible with folds up thisis another commercially available one it's also as you see very compact and the additional pieces fit inside this is your cooking
box the problem with it that i find isthat it's very small it's hard to find pay on the well actually fit in there itcomes with the additional parts up the reflector so if opens up so you end up with acompletely circular reflector system by this one works bestwhen the sun is pretty much directly overhead and like isaid there's some limitations to how much you can put in a now these are three different homemadesolar cookers so just some ideas for what you can do
yourself with easily obtainablematerials these first two have a styrofoam were as the base this is probably thesimplest it just has a single reflector panel tocatch the sun it has a flexible heavy duty plastichere too to help hold the pdn and i have made itwith two different dowell whites so that i can adjust it somewhat howeveri need to to be able to catch the rays of the sunthis one little bit bigger it has four reflectorpanels it has a plexiglass cover
to help hold the heat yeah and the base i love this one is painted black to help absorb more the heat the third one herethe largest is simply made with two cardboard boxesone inside the other was styrofoam peanuts between them to help insulate the walls it also has aplexiglas cover and because this one is made fromcardboard i do have a small cookie sheet paintedblack on the bottom in there to help protectthat now all three of these
are good in that they do collapsesomewhat so this one just fold it down the middle one hereyou need to take the plexiglas how and then the lease webster just folds up and this is ready to store this one probablythe easiest to just take out the down close the flap by i have made a older here to be able tostore my dowels right with it so i always have my my height adjustmentwhite with corp
so you decided you think you're gonnamake a solar cooker be around all right here is everything that you're going to need youneed pay on this one size or another ya need cuttingequipment exacto knife a separated life is good probably some scissors you'll need aruler a dow if you make a single reflectoronly a couple kinds have tape you might want some spray glueheavy-duty aluminum foil either a flexible plastic heavy dutythat can take the heat or
a piece a plexiglas as your leadobviously new york who work some cardboard for a reflector and then once you're cooking y'all needa hot pants or gloves have some sort you need some kind of iraq depending onthe model or the type that you make you might want some up in bags and you might need some paper kit someclothespins but that's it that's all the more you needthe first thing that you want to get is not your cooler the first thing that you have to find isa pain
because once you have the pay on then you can determine what five who were youneed it has to be something that will holdyour pain some of these tapered cool worse nowadays there too narrow at the bottom for apanda said pipes have plans you want somethingthat's going to be big enough to hold a food for your family by it needs to be dark you wantsomething that's lightweight not a real heavy one cuz that takes too long toheat up
and you want something with the kind oflipid that will catch and drip the juices backdown onto your food now if you end up having to buy a silverpandora shiny pan lightweight is best again the kind ofwith that will catch and hold it uses but because it's over we're gonna needto spray paint it black the dark pains absorb the heat your foodto cook a lot faster any kind have a black spray paint itdoesn't have to be something that special for cooking or special for high heat alrightso we have a plan now while the other
one is the paints trying i'm going to use thisone to demonstrate what we need to do now is figure out howmuch a fan angle can we make on this cool or we wanted at an angle to be able tocatch the sun's rays so we'll put pants yeah and i'm gonnaturn it over so you can see a little bit better and i'm gonna go from the back here whati wanna do is will even up space for the handle butin this case i'm gonna leave enough
space for the palmer pay on it as well so i can cut my my sides down to about here so that's missus butfour-and-a-half inches so now i'm gonna turn this back over and marked this at about four and a halfinches down day here and some gonna cut it at an angle fromyear down of go ahead do the same thing on this side mine
and notice i'm cutting from the inside did she i'm not coming from the bear roughly straight across here okay now somepeople prefer to use a serrated knife some people prefer to use an exacto butbasically what we're gonna do is cut this fee serve the who were away cell going to start out at least withthe exacto knife yes it's is just so create the and angle to be able to better catch thesun
my her comes they obviously see all themess that this makes that's what we're gonna do to prevent all this from continuing to shred is going to cover edges with tape next what we're gonna do is longing thiswhole thing with aluminum foil generally what works best is to coverthe two sides first and then use a single sheet
the whole way front bottom and up thebackside though we just need a few sets wide enough what some people like to do is use a spray glue and cover the insidewas for a generally i found that farm eventually the four you alwaysgoing to be for enough and if it's been balloon on is that much harder to replace so i generally just taped for
the edges up before y'all and let it gowith that so there are sides covered you canalready see how nice and reflective they are next what we need to do is cover theinside the easiest way to measure it out tomake sure that you have enough is was just gonna do that as one largepiece so we'll measure it we'll give ourselves enough to fold over the ram fall down alittle bit funny saw my and again
enough to cover the ram and to fall downsome on the backside sell-off measure out ourpeace and then rather than trying to fold thisaround edges and corners the easiest thing todo just mavis over remember we want theshiny side out there was just going fold the edgesback saddam so i've got one side folded know whati'm gonna do to measure it i want my foreal to be just exactly thiswith so output the inside
edge here right on the edge of the fourwheel then i'm going to come over here again on the inside of the cavity and right here this is where i need tofold the the for oil so that i'll have a stripthat's just exactly this wide how this should bewide enough that i can lay it in start with a little bit on the backtheir place carefully slide it down in rather not tearit so we're just gonna work it down the back and
very carefully across the bottom tuck it down into the corners and fold it up over the edge okay so now we've got aluminum foil nice good reflection onall sides what we still need to do is put a littlebit a tape just down in it a couple was spots to to hold it in welltrimmed the front off and will tape it on the outsides justtwo to make keep it in place but actuallythe last thing that we want to do
is spray paint just the bottom black because that will help to hold the heand bounce it back to the pain to that black paint arm as yousaw with one or the other good cookers that i've made you coulduse a cookie sheet if you had something like that that'sblack already in put that in as the base but in this size over cool we're allwe're gonna do is spray-painted black now we just wantenough to be able to whole the heat all right said this isthe cooker now we need to think about reflectors now you can do just a plainsquare reflector like this
or you can do one at an angle whichgives you a little bit broader this is the kind that we want wecan use to make a four-sided reflector but remember even know you want this tobe a little bit broader your scams herehave to be the size that will fit down year so thisstarts out the interior dimension up here stove now we remember we wantthat shiny side on me outside so many to turn it over monday to discuss fold the edges now yes of
formal moored take edges cell there there's a reflect or so now we'recatching even more sunlight down the into theinterior of the cocker now you need to make a coupledecisions if you have plexiglas for you wannaleave use plexiglas all you would need right now would bejust a piece of plexiglass that's the size to cover it and this would be 1 i've your simplestpoppers this one is ready to go
we need a iraq in there and the pot and we could be at cooking with this ifyou don't wanna cut plexiglass and you have some kind of heavy duty plastic you can also cut a piece ofplastic that's what we have over here just on flexible plastic and again we could cut it big enough and in this case because it'slightweight you want to leave a knot of on either side that we can usesome
some thumb tacks and push pins to holdit down hold it in place a.m. the other decisionthat you need to make is do you want a single reflector or are we going to put reflectors on allfour sides since the one that we're gonna that weredemonstrating is from any use all four sides i have to cut my plastic just to the with i love the coker because the for top and the bottom of the reflectorshave to fit down
yen so i'm going to mark this and will heart are stripped aplastic just wide enough to fit across the space way this out and like i said we're goingto use some push pins to just to hold this in place and you could can keep a couple with your copper now i need just enough on this side to giveme a bit over handle and then when i'mcooking with it i want actually have a couple more pushpins
yen over here if you don't have planks aglass or piece of glass for the lead you don't have a heavy duty plastic you dohave another option you can use an up in bed you would prepare your food portrait in the pay an port the pay an years into the oven bag and what youwant to do is use a clip paper i'm paperclip i a clothespinsomething like that close the bag up that's going to helphold the heat are right around the play on and we canput that down into the oven and we would be readyto cook this way
this isn't quite as faster quite asefficient because if there's a breeze your warmair is going to be blown away taken away but the bag at least willhelp already and and it will cook faster than if you just put the pan and withouta lid or without a bag so moving on to me making the otherreflectors this is the the bottoms heart and again this has to be just the size of theinterior dimensions our viewer your cooler your cooker now however you notice i didn't cut theother two out first because this is that
a diagonal so it's not just this measurement but we have to measure the length on the diagonal so this isn't me turn it around so i've got ithere this is ten-and-a-half inches so this is still laying of that i needthe base are the two side pieces to be cell i'll come up here here too and a half the corner is going to behere
follow this one up and and two-and-a-half much if so this is going to be wanna the song i pieces careful with theexacto knife that you don't cut your fingers in you don't cut growers underneath we've cut this onenow you see with the amount love angle thati left on the corners here whole this is goingto keep our reflectors pretty close together which means that something likethis we're only going to be able to use
between about 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. when the sun goes from hereto the same the same angle on the other side whenthe sun is too low you're not going to be able to get muchreflection cell this these angles only i've only added about two-and-a-halfinches extra from the width here i put two and a halfinches extra on each side if you want to be able to use your coker for longer periods of time what you needto do
is make your reflectors with a wider angle so now i've added fiveinches when we connect these you see that we have a lot wider angle here so we're going to be able to catchthe sun for a longer period of time and this is our final step all we needto do now is tape 3 are the corners you don'twanna take the fourth corner because if you do you're not going to be able tofold it down and now i'm using a heavier take prime
i'm using duct tape for this becausethese are going to get a lot more movement and these reflectors are going to begetting warmer once i get them basically in place we'll go back and stabilizethem with an additional piece of tape at thebottom said we have one last connection to make and i'm simply going to put this inplace over here and pay for it
now what we can do now that we've gotthem got this in place is i can go back in port extra tape to support it the one lastthing that you need is a rack inside so if you have a smallcake rack that fits you can do that otherwise you can just twists mgr ringstogether put them in you need something to holdyour pay and up just a little bit of the bottom othercoker so that the bottom receives heat as well and if you want you can always sport two little holes ina twist tie it up all that
fourth-quarter together you don't want to attach it prominently alright so we've made our coker this isthe one we've just finished this is the portable collapsible one we're gonnagive you some hints on how to use them now i already have a pain a black pot inhere heating water will have sliced fresh hot coffee for you in just aminute but a couple of other things you've gotto have some kind have other admits hot pad holdersomething these things get very hot up to 300degrees if you've got bright sunlight
another thing to be aware of just interms of safety when you move around in front of these coker's and even here i'm catching someother there's a lot of reflection black-backed into your eyes so be very careful about where you move some people have saidwell they're concerned about putting them outside on the neighborhood catsdogs going to get them not a problem there plenty hot not thatthese animals are not going to to botherthings
the most important thing that you needis someplace where you've got free access to the sun depending on whatyou're cooking you might only need it for two hours you might need it for five orsix hours so in some cases you're going to have tobe there to be able to move your core coker around to to be able to follow therays of the sun something like this that arm that iswider doesn't need as much movement becauseit's catching rays from all directions you don't need to worry a whole lotabout the clouds a few clouds here and
there not a problem iveco price in this whenit's just overcast it'll take longer but youstill can do it so a few clouds wandering past is not goingto bother your cooking okay well you can certainly feel theheat hear the water should be plenty hot so we'll go ahead make some coffee have already pulled the our appearance of the plastic so we're gonna slide theplastic back on our and make sure you use your gloves cuzthis is definitely hot
left outer coffee water here nancy harrow hard it is see the steam rising up incur it's perfectly but leftover fresh hotcoffee now obviously you can also use yoursolar cooker for reheating any the canned goods in your hurricanesupply as well as making a complete meal all right now let's go on and make somedinner now we're going to use the larger coker heran and this one
is a little bit different some of thethings that you need obviously the rack but because this one is open to all thebreezes if you don't use a bag or something to hold the heatgonna take a lot longer to cook so we'll use it up in bag and with this what we do is we put the rackin the bag first then we'll put the pan in there and thenfinally to close it up you need a clothespin or little twisttie or something to be able to pinch the bagshot once we have the pot in there so will need does let's go ahead andwhat we're going to make
is a chicken rice and tomatoes for startwith a couple of quick rice you can cause regular rice but it'sgoing to take a lot longer its and i'm going to use some flavoredtomatoes just to add some flavor if it's a hurricane season you don'tnecessarily have a whole lot there anything to add some flavor wall will beappreciated now i'm gonna had shaken and some peasbut what i'm gonna do is pour the liquid from the the chicken of into my cup soice know how much extra liquid i have to add so we're using canned chicken againsomething that can come out if your
hurricane supply although if you have raw chicken ifyou've got chicken in the freezer and you want to use it you can certainly do that in a coker toi'm gonna do the same thing with the liquid from the peas poor that of and it doesn't have to bepeas any kind a vegetable that that you tougher so will stir all that up it looks like i just needearly add a little bit of moisture the cup for rice calls for one cup of watercell
and a little bit more here stir that ok and then finally i just for some extra flavor i'm going to in this caseyou some italian seasoning but you could use any kind have i've flavoring seasoning that you wantwhat about a spoonful in there and were ready to go will put the lid on and that is warm already min slide it into the bag
pinched a bad shot now you don't wannaput down tightly because you will notice later that this is reallygonna puff up the bag is going to pop up and then wejust said it in the cooper on the rack since we used canned vegetables can beinstant rice this should be done in an hour to anhour and a half i if we were going to use raw chicken youprobably need two hours maybe two-and-a-half it just depends onwhat you have in there so now you might notice that we've gotthese in a slightly different angle was
the son has moved well i've change these to face the sign probablythe best and easiest way to tell that you've got it at the most direct anglepossible is to look at the shadow the smaller theshadow the more sun is hitting directly into your coker so you just turn ituntil the shadow shrinks the most now this one i just have to follow the the sunbecause this is not adjustable one of the nice thingsabout this coker is that it is
adjustable when the sun is high overhead i havethis panel up fairly high if this rice we're stillcooking say at five o'clock this evening then what i would do is gradually movethis panel down so that it's catching morethe low-angle raise but since we're cooking pretty much atmidday we're just going to leave it up in leavitt keep on cooking now just acouple of things about p.m. both the ones that we have in thecookers right now are just round
casserole tight pants you can use flat pay ans i'm meatloaf for bread pans the blackone is much better it's too hot even to handlethe silver one is going to reflect the lotto the heat back out if you don't have a black can you cancertainly spray-paint wannabes obviously just be outside and if for some things like if you wantto do not bred brownies cake something like that
if you don't have a lead that fits overthis pay an a good idea would be just take a pieceof tin foil spray paint it black just like we did with the one can in thecoker andale it over and that will helpabsorbent direct more the heat right down into your food all right where you can tell the got afew clouds up there so it's not quite as bright but it's been an hour and a halfsewer rice should be done now what i'm gonnado is for school takes a cliff of
and then we're going to four-part out if its bag i could smell the roses seasoningsalready months the warner chicken and rice lookslike her look at this rice is definitely done nice and steamyhot there's dinner thanks to the sun if you're interested in attending aworkshop on making and using a sewer cooper or want basic how-to instructions log onto hillsboro
that i fk kansas state u of l died edu and search on solar cookers or call 813 744 5519