Using your oven less is on every summer energy savings list. These lists all recommend using your microwave, toaster oven or grill to reduce your air conditioning load.
Why use electricity at all? That hot sun heating up your house and your car can be used to cook your food too.
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While humans have been using the sun to preserve food by drying for centuries, cooking with the sun has to date been less common. Technology in the form of cheap reflective material and lightwave capturing material (foil and clear acryclic respectively) didn’t really make solar cooking feasible until after WWII. In the first world where fossil fuels are cheap and delivery ubiquitous solar cooking is still rare. Solar cooking has made its deepest inroads in countries where cooking fuels are risky to gather (conflict areas) or difficult to find (overforesting).
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Up until now. Local inventor/entrepreneur Kim Northrop hopes to change that. “I started 2011 with more time than money. So I thought, this is a great time to work at reducing our costs. One of the things I had been interested in for awhile was solar cooking because it gets so unrelentingly hot here in the summer. I was astounded at first that a box in the sun with a black container would cook food. It seems so…unlikely.” But work it does. And it doesn’t just save money, it saves time too. “I saw this as an opportunity to put my passion for self-sufficiency, savings and sustainability to work and set out to make a small, inexpensive and simple solar oven that could be brought to a wider market.”
Northrop’s Splendy Solar Oven Kit does all that. The kit which includes everything you need to cook in the sun costs just $45.00. “All you have to do is add the food,” laughs Northrop. “It’s small, lightweight—easy to take to the beach—and I painted them so they’d be cute—you wouldn’t mind seeing them in your yard or on your porch.”
Cool Savings.
How much can you save? Your oven generally runs around. $.32 an hour to run. For every hour you run your oven it costs approximately $1.30 in electricity for your AC to compensate for the heat. Using your oven 10 hours a month would cost $16.20 a month in total electricity, 20 hours $32.40.”I cook a lot so my savings were closer to the $30 a month range in the summer” said Northrop. “On a national and international level small amounts of energy savings—even $5 per household per month--add up to large carbon reductions.”
Where can you buy the Splendy Solar Oven Kit? “I’ll be doing two festivals in April, Ecofest April 14th in downtown Sarasota and the Earth Day Festival at Oscar Scherer State Park April 22.” The ovens just got approved for the Phillippi Creek Farmhouse Market and Northrop plans to be selling there by April 18th. Splendy Solar Oven Kit $45 www.funstainables.com.
941-953-7791
