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Introduction
Most solar cookers work on basic principles: sunlight is converted to heat energy that is retained for cooking. Sunlight is the "fuel." The requirements for solar cooking are very simple. You must be able to place the solar cooker in a location that gets sun for several hours and be protected from strong wind. Solar cookers, obviously do not work at night or on very cloudy days. The sunlight is absorbed on dark surfaces that heat up. Food cooks best in dark, shallow, thin metal pots with dark, tight-fitting lids to hold in heat and moisture. To retain the heat created when the black pot absorbs the suns rays some form of transparent cover is needed. This can be as simple as a clear plastic bag or as complicated as evacuated multiple layers of glass. One method to speed the cooking process is to use reflectors to increase the concentration of sunlight on your collector.
The unquestioned authority on solar cooking is Solar Cookers International (SCI). They spread solar cooking awareness and skills worldwide, particularly in areas with plentiful sunshine and diminishing sources of cooking fuel. SCI has enabled 30,000 families in Africa to cook with the sun's energy, freeing women and children from the burdens of gathering wood and carrying it for miles.
SCI also maintains an excellent database of solar cooker designs.
Solar cooking and violence
Solar cooking has an unexpected relationship - good and bad - with violence.
- Anecdotes exist that solar cookers are not promoted by some NGOs in Africa due to domestic violence. When the weather has not been suitable for cooking, and the husband returns home to find no meal ready, he may become violent towards his wife. (This raises other issues, but one immediate issue is not to aggravate the victim's situation by having an unreliable cooker.)
- In Darfur, solar cooking has meant women have not had to leave safe areas searching for firewood - thus these cookers are keeping them out of harms way.
Note that in the case of domestic violence and the failure of the meal to cook, there is a technological solution: integrated cooking (see Wikia:Solarcooking:Integrated cooking method).
The points above come from email conversations. I hope to find get people with experience in these things to contribute to Appropedia. --Chriswaterguy · talk 00:20, 31 October 2007 (PDT)