No longer weighed down by Bac Blancs (mock exams), revision and the Baccalaureat itself, Caiti is back to her usual creative self. Yesterday she rustled up a solar oven. Just like that!

 

Already showing some cat damage :-(

These are clever devices and very practical. They use sunlight to cook food. There are some fiendishly high-tech ones out there that use solar cells but most are low-tech and employ metal or metallised film to generate the high temperatures. Solar ovens work by concentrating sunlight, converting the light to heat and then trapping the heat. And best of all, they’re completely free to run after the initial investment, which can be very low with a homemade one.

Caiti’s was probably a little large but it was a first go. She didn’t manage to cook her tea in it but only because the cats cottoned on to the fact there was food in it and kept diving in. Caits kept guard for a while but it wasn’t much fun. She’ll be trying again with a smaller model of a box cooker once we get the sunshine back and we’ll set up some machine gun nests to keep the felines away.

When she’s got the basic model cracked she can move onto the ones that employ paraboloidal reflectors or paraboloidal troughs or spherical reflectors … the sky’s the limit it seems!

Here are brilliant directions on how to make a super simple solar oven.

Have fun!

Finally, today’s unrelated photo is of cornflowers and ox-eye daisies that we passed during our bike ride on Sunday. Aren’t they beautiful?