Solar Power & Energy

These are some of the initial photos and notes from my first attempts at solar cooking…

I’m using a 6 quart cast iron dutch oven camp stove.

I love cast iron because it heats up so easily, heats uniformly, and stays hot for much longer periods of time. I figured using cast iron would help absorb the solar heat from the sun even on partly cloudy days, and since the pot retains heat so well, it seems to help quite a bit on windy days too.

I love cast iron because it heats up so easily, heats uniformly, and stays hot for much longer periods of time. I figured using cast iron would help absorb the solar heat from the sun even on partly cloudly days, and since …

The most obvious way to cook food with solar power is to setup enough solar panels to power a standard stove. There are many better and much less expensive ways to do this though, so we’ll look at some of those options here.

Solar cooking can be done is a wide variety of ways. In fact, many people make their own home made solar cookers and solar ovens using simple cheap materials like cardboard boxes and tin foil.

There are two basic designs used the most though…

1. Solar Ovens - This solar cooking technique generally uses some sort of box or container, and a piece of glass.

If you’ve ever gotten into a closed car during the summertime and thought (or said) “it feels like an oven in here!” then you’ve already experienced how solar ovens actually work.

Heat from the sun enters a car through the clear windows. Those windows trap the …

I’ve been reading and studying a LOT of information about solar power in the last 6 months or so, because I’m making preparations to move to a remote area and live off grid. Our plan is to start with a small solar panel setup - just enough to run the work laptop so we can continue earning money since we work online - then we’ll add solar panels as needed and wanted over time.

Part of the planning process though, means we need to know how much solar power is needed for the bare minimum of our plans. And figuring that out isn’t so easy of a task.

I don’t fully understand watts, kilowatts, watt hours, voltage and amps… and I really haven’t yet grasped how all these relate to and/or depend on each other. So the learning curve for me has been a bit steep.

I initially came across information online which …