SasEz! Simple & Sustainable Living…

In this first picture you can see two tiers of pans, one is on top the other. The fish tank “solar oven” is over top of them both, holding in the heat and letting everything cook. You can see the steam, or condensation, on the glass of the tank here too.

In this second picture I’ve laid the glass cover back so you can see the burgers. I had to stack one pan on top of another because I didn’t realize these particular two wouldn’t fit side by side under the glass. The bottom pan is a small cast iron skillet, and the top is an old undersized cake pan.

In this last picture the steam has cleared and the glass cover is back in place. So you can clearly see the two stacked pans with the fish tank over top.

At lunch time I cooked a single burger in just the small cast iron skillet, and that worked really well. This batch was put in for supper but it started getting partly cloudy this afternoon. By the time the shade reached them around 4ish, they were just about done. I went ahead and did a quick turn on the propane stove to take the last of the pink out.

Overall I’m really happy with how well this worked :)

Technically these might not be considered actual “outdoor stoves” because one is a propane camp stove and the other is a solar oven setup.

My propane camp stove is actually two stoves. I have a Coleman camping stove on the bottom, with a Northwest Territory camp stove sitting on top of it.

The Coleman stove is really rugged and I like it a lot. It has wind baffles that will really come in handy at times. It was given to me though, and it’s a bit old. When we attached the propane bottle and turned it on, we could hear and smell gas coming out from somewhere even though the burners were turned off. So I was afraid to try and light the burner when I didn’t know where the gas leak was coming from. Once I have more time I plan to try and track down the problem so we can use this one.

The Northwest Territory camp stove works but it’s not the greatest. It’s quite small as you can see in this picture, and the burner knobs have broken off. It’s also really hard to adjust the flame control because there is extremely little movement in those knobs. It’s almost an “on/off” setting only. Trying to adjust the flame lower ends up making it go out :(

This next “stove” is my latest experiment with solar cooking. We’ve had problems with the wind cooling our pot down when trying to cook, so we decided we wanted a glass enclosure. This would serve two purposes:
1. Contain the heat and let it build up, and
2. keep the wind from cooling things down.

We couldn’t find a decent sized glass dome or bowl anywhere, so we ended up buying a fish tank. Yes we’re now cooking some of our food in a fish tank! ;)

As you can see I’ve got my reflector set up to help concentrate the solar heat into the glass cooking area. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to experiment with this yet since we’ve been so busy moving, but I’ve learned it heats water really hot and it does an excellent job of heating up canned foods like hash, so it seems like it will work pretty well for a variety of things.

Update: I cooked a hamburger in my solar oven today! :) It worked really well and was cooked all the way through. So after putting that one on a bun for my lunch, I put five more out to cook through the afternoon for our supper. It’s partly cloudy now though so I’m not sure how they’ll do…

Yesterday!! :) I bought the Sunforce 60 watt solar power generator kit from Amazon and it arrived here safe and sound yesterday afternoon. We’ve been really busy finishing up everything for the move so I don’t have it fully together and generating power just yet. I also wanted to get a battery, so we’re picking that up this afternoon.

I’ll be writing a full review on this system with plenty of pictures soon, but for now I have to say I was surprised at how well the entire kit was packaged. The Amazon reviews showed some people had problems with things being broken on arrival, but mine got here with just about everything in fine shape. In fact, the only broken item I found was the connector tip on the 200 watt inverter that came with the kit. It was wrapped in bubble wrap but a couple of small plastic pieces broke off. William says I can still use it but I don’t want to risk causing problems for my laptop so we’ll use our old 150 watt inverter for now and pick up a stronger one later.

In any case the solar panels themselves seem much nicer than I expected for such a cheap system, and the frames on them are sturdier than I expected too. I’ll get the full details and pictures up here soon…