David Pearson and Brandon Toledo
Professor Everhart
Conceptual Physics
6 November 2013
The Sun-Funnel Solar Cooker
Hello everyone, just recently my friend Brandon Toledo and I decided to make a solar cooker in order to help all of you. This specific solar cooker was used to cook an egg (sunny-side up) by heating up a metal pot through the use of the sun's reflections. This would result in heat radiating off of the walls of the cooker and the heating up of the pot due to the heat that is being given off from the cooker. Knowing that this country and a lot of the people that reside within it struggle with being able to cook food due to the lack of firewood, we have decided that this solar cooker would be the perfect solution for your problem. Below, Brandon and I have listed the materials and steps that are needed in order for you to make one of these cookers. Keep in mind that these are really simple and easy cookers to create.
Building Your Solar Cooker (Sun-Funnel Cooker)
Materials Needed: The materials that you will need in order to properly build your solar cooker are a large cardboard box, duct tape, aluminum foil, glue, a marker, a ruler, scissors/pocket knife, a metal pot with a glass lid, and a stick.
Steps for Building:
(sunnycooker.webs.com)
Above is just a picture of the blueprints that are to be used for creating the cooker.
Step 1: Gather two pieces of cardboard from (from your box) and cut them to the sizes that are shown in the blueprints above.
Step 2: Next, gather two large pieces of your tin foil. Take the tin foil and glue it to one side on both of the pieces of cardboard that you have. Smooth out the foil once it is glued to the cardboard and then trim off the excess foil that hangs off of the sides of the pieces of cardboard.
Step 3: Next, draw the fold lines (seen in the blueprints) on the two pieces of cardboard using a ruler and marker. Make sure that you have the correct measurements. After that, use scissors or a pocket knife and then cut along the lines that you made (MAKE SURE NOT TO CUT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE CARDBOARD) Only make indentations.
Step 4: After you have made indents where the fold lines were, bend the two cardboard pieces and make L-shaped figures with them. Put these two panels together and tape them together with duct tape. By now pieces should look like this when they are put together:
(sunnycooker.webs.com)
Step 5: After you have taped the two pieces together, spread the two sides of the joined pieces of cardboard in order to achieve the "Funnel" shape that we want. You cooker should look something like this now:
(sunnycooker.webs.com)
Step 6: The last step is to make two holes at the lower side walls of the cooker. After that, take the stick that you found and insert it through the two holes (this stick will act as a support system for the pot when you change the angle in which your cooker is pointed).
Once you have finished all these steps your cooker should look something like this:
Brandon and I hope that the building of this Sun-Funnel Cooker was fairly easy for you. We feel that it is a great substitute for those of you who are unable to gather firewood for cooking. We are now going to go over some things that we found when we tested our personal cooker (pictured above).
The Results of Testing the Cooker
Weather Conditions: The weather forecast during the day that we cooked was sunny with 80 degree weather. There weren't really any clouds in the sky at the time and it wasn't extremely hot that day.
What we tried to cook: Brandon and I tried cooking an egg sunny-side up during the day that we cooked. Below are pictures of the egg before we started and after we let it sit for exactly 45 minutes.
Egg before we started cooking:
Egg after 45 minutes of cooking:
As you can see from the pictures above, there really wasn't much change that occurred within 45 minutes of cooking. It is easy to see that it will take more time than 45 minutes to cook an egg with a solar cooker like this one.
What worked well when cooking: We noticed that the way in which you angled the cooker affected the amount of sunlight that it was able to absorb and radiate. Make sure to have an item that you can put under your cooker in order to angle it towards the sun's direction. We also noticed that our pot was getting warm (slowly but surely) whenever it was pointed directly towards the sun and angled to the exact height of the sun. So whenever you are cooking make sure that you do this in order to achieve better and faster results. One last thing that we noticed is that the cooler the day, the harder it is to cook. So if you want the best results make sure to cook on hotter days (preferably above 80 degrees).
Compared to cooking over an open fire: We feel as if this is a much slower cooking process than it is when cooking over an open fire. Although it is healthier and much safer to cook with a solar cooker, it definitely isn't the most time-efficient form of cooking. Compared to cooking over an open fire, a solar cooker is much slower.
Advantages of the Sun-Funnel Solar Cooker: Some of the advantages of the Sun-Funnel Cooker are that it is a healthy way of cooking, it is a safe form of cooking compared to others, and it uses natural light and energy rather than wasting resources and polluting the environment.
Disadvantages of the Sun-Funnel Solar Cooker: Some of the advantages of the Sun-Funnel Cooker are that it is very slow at cooking food, it can't be used all year because of weather changes, and it requires the sun's energy in order to cook food (this is bad because there are only 12 hours worth of sunlight during the day).
Challenges that we had to overcome: When testing our cooker, the challenges that we had to overcome were the amount of sunlight that we were given to cook our egg and the temperature of the air outside.
Reflection: Overall, Brandon and I feel that this is a great form of cooking for the people that aren't able to gather firewood. Although there are many disadvantages that apply to this solar cooker, we feel as if it would of a greater advantage for these people. We believe that this solar cooker can help these people but only temporarily because it isn't sunny all day every day.
Conclusion: All together, we really enjoyed performing this project and explaining the steps in how to properly build a Sun-Funnel Solar Cooker. We hope that you are able to take something from this and that you use this blog to your advantage. We also hope that this can help all of those people out there who are struggling with providing food for themselves and their families. Thanks for reading!
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