Solar cooker

Made a solar cooker from a car windshield shade! Simple, and cost about $9 in materials. It is incredibly straightforward to put together. The windshield shade cost about $6 from Pet Boys, and I also bought some velcro for less than $3. And a special oven bag. The whole design is a mini portable greenhouse (the plastic oven bag) that sits inside a solar collector (the windshield shade folded up in a cone.) The whole thing folds up nicely, is relatively easy and light to move around and reposition, and it works OK. I've used it lots of times to boil water for making tea.


But the bag isn't large enough to fit much into. And the cooker is difficult to position. The original plans must have used a shade that was much stiffer than the one I bought, which was the cheapest one stocked by Pet Boys. You can mold it into the desired shape with your hands, but a moment after you let go, it flops and sags. I ended up pinning strings to the border of the shade and using the strings to stake out the collector. This makes it quite inconvenient to shift with the sun. And the cake rack kept falling into the bucket. This isn't an easy cooker to use, at least not the way I built it, with the floppy shade.