

Inventor turns cardboard boxes into eco-friendly oven - ramoq
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/09/solar.oven.global.warming/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
changed title :)
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jcl
I recall articles in kids' magazines in the mid-80's about how to build solar
cookers. Apparently, they are already in widespread use today, with many
different designs:

<http://solarcooking.org/plans/>

Does anyone know what makes this new design special?

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jrockway
The ones you link to look significantly more difficult to build. This one is
two boxes and a piece of plastic (from what I understand).

I guess this is neat, because I remember building a similar device when I was
a kid, but it couldn't boil water or do any useful cooking. It was sort of
able to warm up a hot dog...

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jcl
You mean, like the first box cooker on the page?:

<http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Minimum_Solar_Box_Cooker>

Like the cooker in the article, it is a foil-lined cardboard box, with a
black-painted cardboard box inside. And it recommends a plastic bag instead of
a plexiglass cover, so it might be considered even more basic than the one in
the article.

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whacked_new
Not to criticize your creativity, but I propose changing the title, because I
was expecting something about food, which it isn't entirely. But it is full of
awesome and based in Nairobi!

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fortunado
I've made one of these before... along with the rest of my third grade class.
I guess someone should have called CNN back then.

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fuzzythinker
An estimated time to boil a liter of room temperature water and cook a sunny
side up egg would have been helpful.

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ableal
Good catch. Some optimistic back-of-the-envelope says it could be around 5 min
for the liter of water. (The egg should go faster, if I remember my WWII-in-
North-Africa frying-eggs-on-tanks movie scenes right ;-)

Assumptions: 1 square meter blackbody collector for 1 kW/m2 solar radiation,
plus dt of 80C (which, for 1l water, needs 80 kcal = 80 x 1.162 Wh) -> 335
seconds.

I'd say a one square meter (~10 sq.feet) box is about equivalent to a standard
700W microwave - between 10 am and 3 pm on sunny days ...

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ableal
Just for the record: a couple of days later, a local newspaper had this story;
_their_ short piece said the box would boil 10 liters in 2 hours.

That's about double my optimistic estimate, which did not take into account
any losses by conduction or convection. From the pics, the box doesn't seem to
be as big as 1 meter square either.

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mhb
Could also be used to distill/desalinate water when it's not in use for other
purposes.

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ramoq
Solve the simplest problem that tons of people have. Excellent invention in my
opinion.

