(Borrowed)Research

I was pretty interested to find that the ED1's were doing their solar cooker assignment outside the Russell Building a little while ago. I remember doing the solar cooker assignment, but I hadn't really thought too much about it since. I decided that since I was going to need something to cook food and possibly boil rainwater to drink, that a solar cooker is certainly a good thing to be thinking about.

I think the designs are interesting, especially the umbrella one pictured here. The problem that I found with this particular crop of cookers is that not very many of them have any kind of insulation. Getting the sun to be focused on your cooker is only half the battle in this case, I think. The other, even more important thing to consider is insulation, and it seems like most of these designs are without it. A pane of glass has an R value equivalent to a sheet of printer paper, which is nothing at all, really. If you can keep the heat in and let the sun keep adding to it, I think that the solar cooker can really be a valuable tool, and it doesn't just have to cook food, it could also heat water or some other kind of thermal mass so that it can radiate out later on and contribute to the internal comfort of a building.