Wouldn’t it be cheaper, more efficient, lower tech, more traditional to just focus heat with foil reflectors omitting the electricity altogether?
Maybe, I really don’t know. Do you perhaps have a relevant tutorial to share?
https://permies.com/t/65217/DIY-Solar-Oven
https://www.solarbrother.com/en/making-a-solar-oven/
Oh come on, just grab some sunlight and go. We’ve built these babes with damaged frenel lenses from huge tvs in junkyard.
This is discussed in the article and tl;dr: it might be somewhat more efficient, but is very impractical.
That’s weird design and comparison; to get similar performance from a tool without electricity, you’d need some heat transfer mechanism between solar collector unit and consumer - steam? sand? just heat sufficient thermal mass and then load it with things to be cooked? I just hate the idea to waste efficiency by transferring energy through electricity here, while all heat losses could have been turned to profits instead. Electricity-centered approach of modern solarpunk pushes just a bit too far, too high tech in places where more traditional approaches could have been used.
Well, I must say that if you already have a solar electrical power system, it would be quite convenient to just hook up the oven there. Then on the other hand any conventional oven could probably do this same trick.
These are things that just came to my mind after reading this; I’m probably going to think about these more and try them next summer. This article is inspiring indeed!
There are some interesting oven designs that use rooftop solar collectors (mirrored troughs with a tube of transfer fluid running through them) connected to normal-ish form factors ovens downstairs. It’s basically the same setup for solar steam generators (if you run a business that uses a lot of steam). The only problem is it’s a direct use of the heat without much storage (from what I remember) so you can’t really start baking before sunup.
There are also some cool designs for direct solar that point a reflector dish into a hole in a wall (the inside of the hole is the inside of an oven in the kitchen). Tamara solar kitchen has one but there are lots of similar versions.
That’s quite complex to build 😅
I started this summer to bake my own bread with surplus solar power in the afternoons. Works quite well with a bog standard bread baking machine that takes about 500W.
I did some napkin efficiency calculations, and while the bread baking machine recovers its costs quite quickly (< 1 year), it is not the solar electricity that makes the most difference to be honest.
