A solar oven or solar cooker is a device which uses sunlight as its energy source. Therefore, it uses no fuel and doesn't cost a penny to run.

There are a variety of different types of solar cookers and all of them use the same principles:

• Concentrating sunlight: Some device, usually a mirror or some type of reflective metal, is used to concentrate light and heat from the sun into a small cooking area, making the energy more concentrated and therefore more potent.
• Converting light to heat: Any black on the inside of a solar cooker, as well as certain materials for pots, will improve the effectiveness of turning light into heat. A black pan will absorb almost all of the sun's light and turn it into heat, substantially improving the effectiveness of the cooker. Also, the better a pan conducts heat, the faster the oven will work.
• Trapping heat: Isolating the air inside the cooker from the air outside the cooker makes an important difference. Using a clear solid, like a plastic bag or a glass cover, will allow light to enter, but once the light is absorbed and converted to heat, a plastic bag or glass cover will trap the heat inside. This makes it possible to reach similar temperatures on cold and windy days as on hot days.
• Plastic Sheet: Uses plastic sheets to assure that liquids do not seep through into the oven. Also the to prevent staining of the underlying sheet in the oven.

Alone, each of these strategies for heating something with the sun is fairly ineffective, but most solar cookers use two or all three of these strategies in combination to get temperatures sufficient for cooking.

The top can usually be removed to allow dark pots containing food to be placed inside. One or more reflectors of shiny metal or foil-lined material may be positioned to bounce extra light into the interior of the oven chamber. Cooking containers and the inside bottom of the cooker should be dark-colored or black. Inside walls should be reflective to reduce radiative heat loss and bounce the light towards the pots and the dark bottom, which is in contact with the pots.

ASES has a solar cooker "under construction" at the solar park. The project belonged to a group of students who have graduated and therefore have abandoned the project since then.

Here are some photos of the oven:

It would be great if we can get people to work on the oven and finish the project once and for all !!!