Solar heat driven

Solar heat applications
I'll be using solar heat in at least four ways:

1) Cooking

2) Pastuerization

3) Dehydration

4) Steam Power

Solar box type oven
My first foray into using solar heat will involve construction of a solar box type oven. I have found some plans that I like but intend to make some minor modifications. My modifications include lining the interior cooking box with 12" X 12" ceramic bathroom tiles, drilling an 1/8" hole in one side to permit steam to escape, and securing the box in an old milk crate to provide some stability and additional weight to prevent toppling in high winds.  I have an empty 1 gallon pickle jar that will paint with black high heat paint including the lid.  I'll be drilling a small hole in the lid to prevent steam pressure from building up and shattering the jar.  If there is excessive whistling, I will bore out the hole large enough to keep from annoying the neighbors during operation.

My reflectors will be aluminum foil lined cardboard trapezoids with 67.5 degree angles on the connecting edges. I plan to buttress them with sections of an old yardstick so they remain rigid.

Keithjd21 (talk) 19:50, May 2, 2013 (UTC)

I tried dismantling an old 10 gallon aquarium today to recover a glass pane suitable for my solar oven. Those things are amazingly well put together. I got close but ended up cracking the panes I was interested in. Have posted a request for a solar oven on Freecycle and will visit a glass shop to have a pane cut if none is on offer.

Cooking with solar heat
[coming soon...]

Pastuerization with solar heat
The first experiment in solar pastuerization will be in a solar box type oven that I will be constructing from cardboard boxes, aluminum foil, glass from an old aquarium, high heat black paint, and an old one gallon glass pickle jar. The lid of the pickle jar will have a small hole drilled in it to allow for enough pressure to build to accelerate boiling while allowing steam to escape fast enough to prevent shattering the jar.

The first item to be pastuerized will in fact be my own poo. This is being done to return NPK and micronutrients to the soil and since I produce food from that soil, I want certainty that all pathogenic organisms have perished. Simple pastuerization will suffice but I hope to achieve a rolling boil to mechanically reduce my feces to very small particles (probably suspended in the water column) that have an enormous amount of surface area for bacterialogical colonization. The sterile solution will be added to old newsprint and composted for use in the integrated food production system.

Dehydration with solar heat
I will be raising fish as part of the integrated food production system. My choice of fish happens to be small livebearing omnivores. Filleting them would be impractical so they will be turned to fishmeal instead. The fishmeal will be produced by thoroughly dehydrating the fish and then grinding them. My research into solar dehydrators is still in its infancy but will become a high priority item soon.

Steam Power Generation
Small steam engines are available from Green Steam Engine that can be driven by solar concentration.