How to build a solar powered electric oven
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
How to build a solar powered electric oven
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Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#2I think some simple MPPT circuitry would be a smart investment for this, rather than a fixed resistance connected directly to a solar panel.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#3Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output?
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Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity):
Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray (black and white with four levels of gray), which dramatically decreases the file size. The black-and-white dithered images are then recolored via the browser’s CSS, which adds no extra data load.
This approach makes images roughly ten times less resource-intensive than full-color high-resolution images, which supports the magazine’s goal of having a low-energy, solar-powered website. However, some images, such as graphs or those with crucial color information, may become less clear under dithering, so the website offers the option to turn off dithering for individual images to reveal the original, heavier images. This balances energy efficiency with the need for clarity when visual information depends on color or detail.
Thus, the dithered image feature is both an energy-saving measure and a distinct stylistic choice that aligns with the philosophy of reducing the environmental impact of web usage while maintaining visual storytelling appeal.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#4Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output? --- Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity): Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray…
It would seem strange if that was the purpose since the first photo on the website is ~40kb
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#5This is fun, I'm curious to try it.
An alternative that I experimented with and found to be very usable is one solar panel, a small camping battery ("portable power station"), and an Instant Pot. The total cost is not super high. The Instant Pot is power efficient and can cook a lot of food at once. Since it's battery powered you can start any time the battery is charged.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#6I think some simple MPPT circuitry would be a smart investment for this, rather than a fixed resistance connected directly to a solar panel.
It's from Low Tech Magazine. A low tech solution is not surprising. Chasing 20 or 30% solar generation efficiency gains isn't really something all that relevant when you're building an oven that you're going to leave switched on all the time whether you're cooking or not.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#7I think some simple MPPT circuitry would be a smart investment for this, rather than a fixed resistance connected directly to a solar panel.
An MPPT would double the cost of this setup.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#8This is fun, I'm curious to try it. An alternative that I experimented with and found to be very usable is one solar panel, a small camping battery ("portable power station"), and an Instant Pot. The total cost is not super high. The Instant Pot is power efficient and can cook a lot of food at once. Since it's battery powered you can start any time the battery is charged.
There are now commercial ovens with LiFeO4 batteries in then that do basically just that.
Except they're stupid expensive.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#9With the panels I have on my balcony I get about 200 watts even on overcast days. I would love to have appliances that were optimized for lower peak consumption. But many appliances like the fridge have low average consumption but high peak consumption so that while the panels on average produce about as much as I consume per day in reality I still have to buy power from the grid.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#10Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output? --- Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity): Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray…
You can also find this information in the web site itself: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...