Birth of a solar oven

The kids and I have worked on our homemade solar oven a little bit. It is taking shape pretty nicely. I planned to photograph our step-by-step progress, but it is evidently a little tough to get decent photos of aluminum foil. Almost all of the shots were blurry, so you'll have to use your imagination to fill in the details.

Our beginnings: the boxes that we would paint black on the outside, and cover in foil on the inside. The smaller box sits inside the larger, with a little airspace all around.

The airspace between the boxes is packed with torn up brown paper grocery sacks. Then we used foil tape to seal up the gap. The outer box is covered with kitchen foil. The inner, with an aluminum car window shade that we bought at the Dollar Store.

We will use another car window shade as a sunlight director, to get as much heat to the oven, as possible.

We still need to paint the lid black, and add a piece of glass or some plastic to the top, to hold in the heat. First, we are going to try plexiglass or a couple of layers of clear plastic sheeting to make the entire rig a little easier to handle.

We are about an hour into this project, and we have spent less than $10.

$2 on 2 cans of black spray paint.
$2 on aluminum covered auto shades
$1 on aluminum foil
$5 on a roll of foil tape


The helper. Little sister helped, too but she is totally camera shy, don'tcha know?