Build An Outdoor Solar-Powered Oven From Items Around Your Home

Choose Your Task: 

Hot Dog Challenge

You'll need to be able to test the internal temperature of your hot dog every 5 minutes for 1 hour. You can do this using a meat thermometer if you have one in your kitchen. Your goal is to bring your hot dog up to 140 degrees in order to consider it fully cooked through. Your goal is to create the greatest change in internal temperature over the course of the hour.  

Chocolate Challenge

Pretty straightforward - time how long it takes to melt a piece of chocolate! Faster times will indicate a solar cooker that is able to more intensely trap and direct the sun's rays. 

Materials

Create your solar cooker in whatever shape or style inspires you, but there are guidelines for what types of materials you may use. Consider shiny materials that will help reflect sunlight rays directly onto your food. Consider insulating materials that help trap and contain the heat around your food. Consider the strength and structure of your materials to make sure the cooker will support itself as you set it outside. 

***However, one requirement of your solar cooker is that it should be made of entirely recycled, recyclable, or biodegradable materials; or materials that can be cleaned and re-used, like pots/pans, lids, mirrors, etc***

Health & Safety

Though it might be fun to use your homemade cooker to cook an item - we cannot necessarily recommend you eat it, because you will probably not be working with sterile cook surfaces. It might be better to enjoy a hot dog cooked inside or on the grill while you monitor the success of your home cooker!

Possible Ways To Gauge Your Success

... I would eat this hot dog....vs... no way would I eat this hot dog...

...compare with a friend: who had the greatest change in temperature?...

...compare with your class: whose chocolate melted fastest?...

...the solar cooking surface can be cleaned and reused... vs... it's permanently seared with chocolate or hot dog...

...could you easily pack your solar cooker in your backpack to carry it for use in a remote area?...

...could you gather these supplies quickly and inexpensively, for example in a remote village of a developing country?...

How Does A Solar Cooker Work? 

Here's some background on the 4 types of solar cooker designs you might want to try. Keep in mind that these are products available for purchase, and your solar cooker will be designed and built by you, so you are trying to mimic these styles with your own spin and iterations. 

A solar cooker works by harnessing and focusing the sun's rays. It works best in direct sunlight on a clear and sunny day, but can still work on a cloudy day to some degree (after all, we're still experiencing sunlight even on a cloudy day!). 

There's actually a lot of math involved in the solar cooker. You have to think about 

• The angle of sunlight

• The reflection of the sunlight 

• The focal point: the location where the most sun rays will come into focus (how can you get the reflected rays to all meet at one point?

For this reason, you'll see many of these designs feature shiny materials creating a box, cone, or dome around a central point where the food is placed. 

If you're not sure where the best location is for your food item, try your solar cooker out for a few minutes with different angles of your shiny surface and with your food in different locations within the device. Use a thermometer to check the temperature of your food and use that data to drive your decisions about where you place the item that is to be "cooked." 

And remember - the Earth is always rotating, so the sun's location above your solar cooker is not fixed! You may need to move your solar cooker around during the process to continue to keep it in direct sunlight.