Making use of energy which comes for free is, without doubt, a great way to save money and show your care for environment. Charles Hanson, a 75-year-old green enthusiast, has built a solar-powered oven just “because he wanted to“. Pictured above is Mr. Hanson, in the parking lot of the Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, using a thermometer to see how hot the exterior of the oven gets before baking cookies.
His homemade oven features two struts (16 square mirrors each) that are angled in a way to reflect light at a black metal box, which is a $15 refurbished oven Hanson found at a junkyard. The whole thing is placed on a utility trailer, so that it can be moved from one place to another with utmost ease. Mr. Hanson says…
I am absolutely not qualified to be doing any of this. Not only do I not have a background in physics, I don’t have a foreground.
This solar-powered oven can cook anything, but till now, Hanson has baked only Betty Crocker’s peanut butter cookies, and he calls them “solar cookies”. Hanson says that he has to use shims to secure all the parts everytime he assembles his oven. The oven costs $1000 in materials, excluding the cost of the trailer. Interestingly, Hanson cites…
We’re not going to save the world by building solar ovens. I know that.
But, his attempt is sure to make people think more about solar power and its benefits. He has earlier made a partially underground solar home, which wasn’t a pure success. The house ran on solar energy during sunny days, but during rough weather conditions, the home needed backup electricity.
Teresa Foster, founder of Transition Longmont (an organization aimed at building local resilience from peak oil, climate change and economic instability by forming strong communities), said…
Solar ovens — whether homemade or mass produced — are part of showing communities there are alternatives to using grid energy. It’s actually showing people that we can do things a whole new way.
Via: TimesCall