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How to build a solar powered electric oven

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

11–20 of 55 posts

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#11
post #3

Why 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…

Probably best to read the Low-Tech Magazine site About page explaining what they do as a solar-powered site:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#12

This 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.

I had fun doing this over the summer with a 100W panel, a 1kWh battery (1500W max output), and various cooking appliances: rice cooker, hot water kettle, instant pot, induction cooktop. On a sunny Pacific Northwest day I could charge the battery around 50%, more if I rotated the panel diligently. Rice cooker and hot water kettle (5L) would use about 40-50% of it per usage. So during the summer it was handling all of my power needs for those two appliances. It was always fun getting to full charge and frantically finding novel ways to "not waste" the sunlight. Charging my power tool batteries, etc. One time I even charged my EV 1% but that wasn't very practical.

Some other interesting things I learned: the battery passively eats about 5-10W, and on a cloudy day the solar panel would only get 10W during the day. So in the cloudy PNW winters it can't even maintain the battery let alone charge it. The inverter eats another 30-50W or so, so you have to turn it off when you're not using the AC outlets. My battery lets me separately power AC and DC (USB-A and USB-C) so I was charging devices via USB and not wasting energy powering the inverter.

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#14
post #9

With 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.

batteryhookup is a great source for used batteries, it's pretty affordable to build your own setup to run stuff like a fridge

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#15
post #9

With 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.

> But many appliances like the fridge have low average consumption but high peak consumption

You need an “inverter drive” fridge. It’s effectively soft-start and stays on continuously instead of justt a binary on/off.

Many options available at the consumer level.

Dunno if it gets angry if it senses that it’s browning out its own circuit or just reduces its draw (vs increasing current draw). But does mean it can dial up and down its draw on a continuous basis.

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#16
Even if insulated, isn’t this setup always heating the home? The insulation slows down the heat transfer but if I’m following correctly it’s basically running the heat element anytime the sun is up. I think this would be counterproductive in my climate as I’m cooling the home most of the year which is an even more energy intensive process

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#17
post #9

With 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.

batteryhookup is a great source for used batteries, it's pretty affordable to build your own setup to run stuff like a fridge

Jerryrigging a setup of used batteries and an inverter for my fridge sounds like a great way to save two euros a months in exchange for burning my apartment down :D.

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#18

Even if insulated, isn’t this setup always heating the home? The insulation slows down the heat transfer but if I’m following correctly it’s basically running the heat element anytime the sun is up. I think this would be counterproductive in my climate as I’m cooling the home most of the year which is an even more energy intensive process

[deleted]

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#19

Even if insulated, isn’t this setup always heating the home? The insulation slows down the heat transfer but if I’m following correctly it’s basically running the heat element anytime the sun is up. I think this would be counterproductive in my climate as I’m cooling the home most of the year which is an even more energy intensive process

All cooking appliances are heating the home if you view it in that lens. Fridge, normal cooktop, oven, airfryer, dishwasher.

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#20
I wonder, how hard would it be to make a vacuum insulated oven like a big thermos flask?

I know this is “low-tech” but still think it might be possible to fabricate something even if it means spending some of your power budget maintaining the vacuum with a pump.

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