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How to build a solar powered electric oven

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#41
post #34

Some design alternatives: • Use lime cement rather than portland cement for the mortar. Portland will be damaged over time by the 120° temperature and may spall explosively, causing injury, particularly if you embed nichrome heating elements in it. • Similarly, don't use plaster of Paris inside the oven. It will also degrade over time at that temperature. Waterglass would work to fix tiles to wood but will foam up wh…

The "Hot Diodes!" paper from 02019 that de Decker cited (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235272851...) is promising. It points out that PV module voltage is nearly constant over a wide range of illuminance, so you can get much closer to the maximum power point with a nearly-fixed-voltage load like a string of diodes than with a linear resistance.

It occurred to me that this was a potential use case for obsolete CPUs, which are often conveniently removable from ZIF sockets in obsolete computers. Almost all chips have "clamping diodes" on every pin except their power rail pins, in order to keep those pins within 600mV of the power rails to prevent damage. If you connect the power rails backwards, the clamping diodes are forward biased and start to conduct; at least with old SSI chips and EPROMs, this can get the chip quite hot. Normally the clamping diodes are only rated for 0.5mA or so each but I'm guessing that often they won't actually melt until quite a bit more than that. In normal use, current microprocessors commonly draw over 100 amps at 1.2 volts or so, for which purpose they are packaged in ceramic with metal heatsink surfaces. I doubt you can get the whole 100+ amps through their protection diodes, but maybe you could get enough heat to cook with. Certainly the chips will withstand the 120° temperatures of this oven with no difficulty.

I should also mention that lime cement needs access to carbon dioxide from air to cure. If you sandwich it between ceramic tiles, it won't cure. Similarly for sealing it with waterglass: let it cure for a month first.

There are other candidate cements that are also safe for oven use, including some which can be made from common materials. Many that are too expensive for buildings because they cost over a thousand dollars per tonne would be fine for this purpose. Wood ash makes a perfectly adequate substitute for lime cement, for example. Some alternatives can cure without air; I found a very interesting recipe for "fire mud" in an Ayurveda textbook which is largely iron oxide and buffalo milk held together until heating with a little gum arabic, the reaction product presumably being a calcium iron phosphate similar to anapaite and some rodent teeth. Some industrial castable refractories use a similar formula, though aluminum phosphate is a more common backbone.

(Why would an Ayurveda textbook have a recipe for castable refractories, and why should we believe that it works? I haven't tried it, but its claimed use is for connecting ceramic vessels together to make distillation and calcination apparatus, and you'd hope that practitioners would notice if their distillation apparatus were unusable—even if they can't tell if the drugs they distill with it kill patients.)

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#42
post #32

Just as a note pressure cookers like the Instapot are rated at 1000wh but they don't use that all the time IIRC — only initially when building the pressure. In simple terms it's like using 1kw for 10 - 15 mins and not an hour. So on average very efficient. Has someone measured the time for max usage and average usage? Could be a good alternative with a 1kwh lfp battery with a lot of juice left over after pressure coo…

I used my Instapot ONE time as a hotpot thing, keeping a broth hot, almost cooking, for 2 hours with no lid. It died that day (thermistor).

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#43
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…

This feels (needlessly) performative. I get the idea, but the low quality images make it harder to understand what they are showing in the photos, which makes it harder to then reproduce their work. I suppose the vast majority of users will not need the higher resolution, so perhaps have it be a toggle to get the higher-resolution when needed.

All the comments here underline the un-needlessness of this performative act.

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#44
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…

There is a button under the image that will show you the color version. As others mentioned, the site's about page explains the rationale.

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#45
post #35
post #26

This article references a 2023 article about lithium battery costs with price at 750 EUR per kWh (approx 12V 100Ah) for 30 years life couting 3 replacements if I read correctly note 5: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power... These days 1 kWh of LFP battery is 70-150 EUR depending on the brand, so far lower than referenced. And LFP cell lifetime is probably 20 to 30 years. In a system it means…

Storage is booming in my very much coal-powered country with residential storage going from 115MWh to 670MWh over the course of 2024. As it stands it's enough to power the country for about two minutes, but that's two minutes gained in a year. In the commercial space there's a total of 4.3GW of peak output commissioned to be deployed before 2030. That will greatly help in shaving the afternoon increase in electricity…

There are also other types of batteries emerging from which options will emerge.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/22/green...

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#46

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

Stick it in the balcony then?

That conversation with my wife would be comical

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only when you cook, though, except for the fridge, which produces very little heat.

Yes this is exactly my point, I don’t cook ~12 hours a day every day. Usually less than 1 and even use the oven less often, most days not at all

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#48
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only when you cook, though, except for the fridge, which produces very little heat.

Yes this is exactly my point, I don’t cook ~12 hours a day every day. Usually less than 1 and even use the oven less often, most days not at all

Right. Although actually cooling is less energy-intensive—removing 3000 watts of heat only costs about 1000 watts of electricity.

Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven

#50
post #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.

maybe vacuum insulated panels.

A big thermos would be much more challenging, though there are already long vacuum bottles/tubes used as solar cookers.

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