Designing a solar cooker

Many solar cookers can be made without much design at all. It's amazing what a few reflective surfaces or a bit of black paint can do with bright sunlight. This page will evolve to show a bunch of design tips should you need them as I learn more.

Capturing the sunlight

The capture area is the area of sunlight that you'll be capturing. There are many misconceptions about capturing sunlight, especially when it comes to reflectors, and often brought on by thinking of sunlight as a fluid such as water. See this page on designing your capture area for more.

Designing reflectors for solar cookers

The whole purpose of reflectors in a solar cooker is to capture a large area of sunlight and direct it all down to where it can be converted to heat. Improperly designed reflectors will reflect some of that sunlight right back away. This page on how to design reflectors for a solar cooker will show you how to make sure the sunlight goes to where you need it.

How I designed a fresnel lens and mirror solar cooker

Normally a fresnel lens sends sunlight down to a cooking pot. This results in a very bright light to look down on that requires welding goggles to look at. I wanted an arrangement where the light would shine up to the bottom of the pot so that no goggles would be needed. This page is all about how I designed my fresnel lens and mirror solar cooker.

Comments - Connect here with Facebook Connect.