Solar Oven Basics

Solar oven basics is essentially about how solar cookers work.

One of the first things to understand is that using a solar panel cooker or box type solar oven is simple and relatively safe.

Set it up, put in the food and point it towards the sun. That's it! (Even I can do it!)

Okay. Maybe I left out a few steps, but not many. You have to prepare the food. There's not much to that either. Depending on the recipes you choose, most solar cooking is less complicated than stove top, and you don't have to stir the food because the heat in the solar oven is evenly distributed.

In that respect, a solar oven is like a conventional oven. Hot air heats the cooking vessel (pot, casserole dish, pan, cookie tray) which heats the food.

Radiant heat also warms the cooking pot in a conventional oven. In a solar oven, this is accomplished by the sun's rays striking the pot directly and converting the light to heat as it is absorbed by the dark material of the pot.

There are basically two ways to surface the inside of the solar oven.

One way is to make the surfaces inside the oven reflective. This bounces the sunlight off of every surface and onto the cooking pot. This method heats the pot faster but relies solely on the pot to heat the chamber of the box type solar oven.

The other way is to make all of the surfaces inside the solar oven a dark color, usually black, which heats up those surfaces and radiates the heat into the chamber which heats the pot.

Good insulation is important in a box type solar oven so that the heat does not escape through the walls of the cooker.

An air tight chamber is also important because if you have air flow out of the box type solar oven, you will be losing valuable heat and the temperature inside the oven will decrease just as it would in a conventional oven.

Using a solar (reflective) panel oven or a solar box type oven can be compared to using a conventional slow cooker, most often called a crock pot.

A solar oven cooks the food slowly, letting the juices do their job. Some moisture comes out of the food. Other juices stay in the meat and vegetables which means that your solar cooked meal will be juicy and tasty.