The Solar Cooker

me, all-the-way-from-santa-fe, and the second i walked in the door i lifted my eyes to see eric's solar reflector still taking up space awkwardly in the middle of his living room. you should have seen it - huge, cardboard, ugly - aluminum cans peeling up from their places as if to say, "this will never work". i loved it. the ingenuity. the hard work. the passion was there - i could see that. it was his hammer. one man, acting alone, swinging away at all the troubles of his world like john henry at his mountain. his was an honorable task and a very real challenge. eric's solar reflector had turned out to be a bit of a failure, but it was an important step toward my very own change in paradigm.

it was eric's first cooker, an oven type (pictured), that had been a moderate success. sure, it hadn't been quite capable of boiling water, eric's benchmark for solar cooker success, but it had heated up to 170 degrees. and hey - that's hot enough to pasturize water, making it safe for drinking. this was literally a cardboard box lined with aluminum foil and already here was this serious practical application - especially in those parts of the thrid world where there isn't enough safe drinking water. it was a good start, and there was so much room for improvement.

i wanted to make a reflector. i thought eric was on to something there, but flattening out beer cans just wasn't going to provide the smooth curved surface he needed to focus the sun's rays to a single point. i wanted to start with some manufactured surface and work from there. i was thinking of a satellite dish. it works along the same principle, but it's engineered to spec., saving us the trouble of building something substandard and from scratch. on a sunday we jumped in the car and headed for the junk yard.

ok - so, we didn't find my satellite dish, but we did find a big-ass light ballast. would it work? we took it home, cleaned it, and argued endlessly about what might give us the best results. just for kicks, i hung a pot from strings at noon the next day and the thing shot up to 170 degrees. we set upon improving it. largely driven by my impatience, we hunted down the old swiss army stove - a sweet find - and painted it black. the next day we put the cooker outside at 10:00 pointed it south, and by 10:45 water was at 206 degrees and holding - at a rolling boil under the power of the sun - and this was in october. it was a real trick getting the thing out of there - i mean it was hot hot HOT! we had built a very working solar cooker of hybrid design - combining a reflecting dish with an enclosed, insulating oven space - and effectively constructed out of junk.

wait, what?

water holding at a rolling boil? i had no idea it was even possible, yet plausible - hell, it was practically too easy! and with all my extensive (read: expensive) education in science and engineering there was nothing in my intuition that suggested that the sun could boil water on a cool fall afternoon on eric's front lawn. it blew my mind - defied all my scientific common sense. i guess they just don't teach this stuff in school. sure, i've seen semi-conducting solar panels converting energy from the sun into an electrical potential, even powering a car. and yes, i've seen the sun's rays focusing to a point and cooking the hell out of an unsuspecting ant. but solar energy has always felt so delicate and ethereal. i never felt any substance or a strength there. but seeing the sun pound out a dynamic 206 degrees felt like real power. for the first time it felt so simple and accessible - it felt like discovery. i felt like Isaac fucking newton.

but why? i hadn't done anything new. there are existing technologies capable of harnessing the sun's energy. and eric and i weren't the first to build a solar cooker in this same way. but there was something about my experience that felt so new to me. i felt like i was cheating - or stealing. i never knew that there was so much free flowing energy under the mid-day sun. a rolling boil on the front lawn - there was still snow on the ground - amazing. i imagine that same pot of water, or hearty stew, heating up on the stove top or in the microwave. i think about just how much "conventional" energy it takes to heat that same pot up to a boil and hold it there. it seems like a lot. and where does it come from? my mind traces the cord back to the wall, up a line, down the street. to where exactly, i'm not sure. but i see it, the place where some huge machine is pumping, churning, burning - making my meal out of an energy source i don't see and can't comprehend. and from what? you guessed it - fossil fuels.

there's just such a disconnect. my experience is that my energy comes from a hole in the wall. i don't gather the wood, turn the wheel, or light the fire. i don't even need to think about it. energy is so available, something we use so often and so easily, that we can't conceive of producing it or going out and harvesting it on our own. but cooking on your front lawn with the clean, free energy of the sun was a really enlightening experience for me. it's so simple and it's right there! it's there all the time - every day, all over the world. it's falling down all around us - and going largely unused by the modern man.

you don't need to wait for your government or your power company to come around. you don't need to take a class or hold certification. you don't need semiconductors. it's right there and you have everything you need to make use of it in a practical and meaningful way. who knew?

i want to introduce all of you to eric kampe's blog. he's a most excellent and life-long friend of mine who (with a little pressure) has started a blog that will be changing the world in small manageable doses. please add him to your favorites and post regularly in the comments section. we want to hear from you!

http://erickampe.blogspot.com/