Englishtown

Cooking with solar power

What do you get if you combine sunshine and a cooking pot with cardboard, glue, aluminum foil, black paint and some glass or plastic?

Dinner, that's what!

How so? Because with these materials you can make a portable sun-powered oven to cook anything your palate fancies .

Most solar cookers rely on the "greenhouse effect," the same phenomenon that warms your car on a sunny day. The principle is simple: let sunlight in, then trap the resulting heat.

These cookers are either of the box or panel variety. The box cookers direct sunlight through a window in the lid. Inside the insulated box, the

blackened bottom and black pot absorb the trapped heat and cook the food. In the case of panel cookers, shiny panels reflect light upon a black pot enclosed in a clear, heat-proof bag. There's no box here, but the result is the same.

A third type of solar cooker uses a parabolic reflector. Shaped like a TV satellite dish, the reflector focuses the sun's rays on the pot in a powerful heat-generating beam.

Constructing a solar cooker is, by and large , a simple matter. The materials for box or panel cookers, in particular, cost little, while free plans are readily available on the Internet.

In affluent countries, constructing a solar cooker can be a fun weekend project; and using it

regularly can certainly help the environment. In the developing world, meanwhile, solar cookers are actually saving lives and improving the well-being of thousands. Greater reliance on solar cooking in Africa, Latin America and Asia means less reliance on firewood for fuel. This in turn yields considerable health and environmental benefits. Solar cookers are also being used to sterilize water, further bolstering public health and safety.

Solar cookers may not save the world, but already they're making a vital contribution both in helping the needy and protecting our global environment. And that's a thought that should bring a little sunshine into just about anybody's life!

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