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This summer, let a solar oven cook for you

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy, what a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out, before we tackle that.”

– Thomas Alva Edison

Science is all “whiz-bang!” to today’s media-saturated kids. They think everything flies, transforms and explodes, Hollywood style.

So when my granddaughter was assigned to conduct an experiment for her fifth-grade science fair, she wanted to build a robot. Said android – to be built in six weeks – would set and clear the dinner table, her main household chore. I was to be her assistant in this endeavor.

After some discussion, we settled on the slightly less ambitious goal of equipping a couple of identical jars of water with thermometers and warming them in the sun. My granddaughter hypothesized that if sunlight warms an object, focusing more sunlight on that object will get it warmer faster.

To test her hypothesis she modified two identical apple boxes to hold the jars: one retained its plain cardboard surfaces and the other she lined with reflective aluminum foil. Then she placed the boxes next to each other facing the sun and put the jars in the boxes. Sure enough, the jar in the reflective box got 10 to 15 degrees warmer and heated up faster than the jar in the plain cardboard box.

While hardly technological wizardry, her experiment was real science, which mostly involves taking careful, repetitive measurements and fussing over their statistical interpretations. But demanding and boring though it can be in the details, science becomes exciting when all the grunt work yields tangible results that are informative and useful to humanity.

In my granddaughter’s case, the grunt work is paying off in several ways: She’s leaning how science works and beginning to appreciate the sun’s quiet power. Also, she’s proven that with a little help even a fifth-grader can construct a deceptively simple device with enormous potential for addressing global problems.

By Googling “solar-oven images” as she designed her project, she learned that devices similar to her reflective apple box are being deployed in many regions of the developing world where scavenged firewood is used for cooking fuel. Cooking with wood causes many environmental and social ills including deforestation, which destroys ecosystems and reduces our global carbon sink; emitting soot which lands on glaciers, darkening them and speeding their decline; causing deadly lung diseases for those who cook indoors; and forcing women, the principle cooks, to range ever farther from home in search of increasingly scarce firewood.

A number of organizations are addressing this problem by introducing inexpensive, reliable, fuel- and pollution-free solar cookers – capable of cooking everything from roast chicken to stew in pots – to the affected areas. Google “solar cookers for developing countries” if you want to help.

But think, too, of building your own solar cooker from one of the many free plans you can find online. If you use your cooker just a few times each summer, you’ll reduce your carbon footprint a little. But if you also invite your neighbors, especially their kids over for some savory solar stew, your demonstration solar cooker could make a big difference at our ecological house.

Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him via email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.



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