Global Sun Oven - Solar Cooker Review

Global Sun Oven – Solar Cooker

21Zo7o4UEZL. SL160  Q&A: Looking for a solar cooker that is NOT a Global Sun Oven. Any suggestions?
  • Rust-proof, highly polished, mirror-like anodized aluminum reflectors
  • Sets up in minutes
  • Lightweight with carry handle
  • Easy temperature monitoring
  • Will reach temps of 360 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit


The Global Sun Oven® is the world’s most widely used solar oven. Solar cooking has been around for centuries, but up to now, not many people have had the opportunity to try cooking with the sun. Using the most advanced materials, the Sun Oven takes all the hassles out of solar cooking to create the ultimate solar appliance.
The sun oven can be used in the winter as well as summer. It has been used very successfully at below zero conditions at a base camp on Mt. Everest.
Measures 19″ x 19″ with an average depth of 11″. The total weight is only 21 pounds. You can bake bread, make cookies, pizza, muffins, or anything you could prepare using a conventional oven.
The Global Sun Oven® lets you harness the power of the sun to cook without fuel and is currently being used in over 126 countries around the world.
Sundance Solar is proud to carry this high quality solar appliance that is designed to last a lifetime.
buynow big Q&A: Looking for a solar cooker that is NOT a Global Sun Oven. Any suggestions?
List Price: $ 299.50
Price: $ 239.00


This Review is from: Global Sun Oven – Solar Cooker by SUN OVENS International, Inc.

First use yesterday. Wash, DC area. Late winter, sunny. Ambient temp was high 50s to low 60s. Max temp of about 325, with the built-in thermometer showing 310 – 315 most of the 1.5 hours it was in use. Adapted a recipe from “Glorious One-Pot Meals” by Elizabeth Yarnell (available from Amazon) using an old one quart Pyrex dutch oven and doubling the cooking time.
The finished meal cooked up nicely. The original recipe called for 45 minutes @ 450 degrees. I’m an inexperienced cook, but interestingly, the lower temp and necessarily longer cooking time seemed to produce more liquid.
My one caveat is to follow the directions to pre-heat the oven and clean its interior well before your first use. The interior is plastic. I let the oven heat up a little, then ran a wet paper towel over everything. Off-gassing of the plastic that likely would have occurred had I followed the manufacturer’s directions, instead occurred while my meal was cooking. Result was a slight plastic-y (and assuredly carcinogenic) taste in that first dish.
Good build quality, but clearly from a small factory. Not meant to be pejorative. In fact, I like the idea of the company being a small business, particularly in the U.S. However, we’re used to perfect looking, assembly line manufactured, robotically assembled stuff and this isn’t. The plastic shell appears to be custom fabricated. The other parts are off-the-shelf components that have been adapted for this use and clearly assembled by hand. Hence, you’ll find exposed, untrimmed rivets and an entirely functional but somewhat roughly finished wooden frame to which the hardware is attached.
All in all, I like it and it’s worth its purchase price — generally between $240 and $300 depending on the retailer.
Pro:
Works as advertised. Good build quality. Easily maintained temps above 300 degrees.
Con:
Plastic interior — SEE BELOW!
23 Augusst 2008 Update — after reading the comments on my and others’ reviews, have double-checked and the interior is in fact metal. Nevertheless, follow the instructions and pre-heat a time or two before first use to allow the interior paint to finish curing, off-gas, etc.
Enjoy! Good stuff!


This Review is from: Global Sun Oven – Solar Cooker by SUN OVENS International, Inc.

My mother first sent me plans for a solar cooker when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya back in the 1900s, but being young and foolish, I preferred to walk an hour to town for kerosene to light my little stove. (Heck, I couldn’t cook, anyway.)
Being much older and a little wiser, I finally woke up to the idea of solar cooking. A parent at the school I work at donated the money to buy a Sun Oven, and my science class fired it up yesterday. I had never cooked in a solar oven before, so I was fully expecting some initial failures, which would be disappointing but instructive. I figured if it could heat up water, we’d bake brownies. The kids (7th and 8th graders) were unusually motivated to see this thing work. Some boys who have never previously volunteered in class eagerly peeled off the protective coating from the reflectors. We set the box outside facing the sun, and it quickly heated up to almost 300 degrees. It easily passed the water heating test, so other students mixed together my favorite brownie recipe (from Baking Illustrated), and into the sun it went. An hour later it passed the toothpick test, so the students tucked into moist, delicious brownies at lunch! It exceeded our wildest expectations for our first solar cooking attempt!
Today I’ve been experimenting some more, and I’ve cooked some brown rice (I’ll use less water next time), a small loaf of bread (nicely browned crust in one hour), corn on the cob (no water necessary!), and an encore of the brownies. Everything has turned out very well, and all it took was turning the box every half hour or so.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Global Sun Oven - Solar Cooker Reviews

Global Sun Oven – Solar Cooker

829ec what is a solar oven 21Zo7o4UEZL. SL160
  • Rust-proof, highly polished, mirror-like anodized aluminum reflectors
  • Sets up in minutes
  • Lightweight with carry manage
  • Simple temperature monitoring
  • Will reach temps of 360 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit
The Global Sun Oven® is the world’s most widely utilized solar oven. Solar cooking has been around for centuries, but up to now, not numerous men and women have had the chance to try cooking with the sun. Utilizing the most advanced materials, the Sun Oven takes all the hassles out of solar cooking to develop the ultimate solar appliance.
The sun oven can be employed in the winter as nicely as summer. It has been used quite successfully at beneath zero conditions at a base camp on Mt. Everest.
Measures 19″ x 19″ with an average depth of 11″. The total weight is only 21 pounds. You can bake bread, make cookies, pizza, muffins, or anything you could prepare utilizing a conventional oven.
The Global Sun Oven® lets you harness the energy of the sun to cook without having fuel and is currently getting utilized in more than 126 nations about the globe.
Sundance Solar is proud to carry this high high quality solar appliance that is created to last a lifetime.
buynow big
List Value: $ 299.50
Value: $ 239.00

Which is a lot more versatile, a solar dehydrator or a solar oven? Many solar ovens are sold with the promise that, besides cooking food by the power of the sun, you can also dehydrate food. I have owned two solar Sun Ovens for nearly two years and have cooked each kind of food that I ever cooked in a conventional oven. I found that food cooked in a solar oven employing the suns rays tastes much better — moist, not dried out or overcooked if left in for longer than its typical cooking time. Solar cooking has turn into a way of living, not out of necessity to save cash, but since the food tastes so a lot far better and the nutritional value is not diminished as with traditional cooking methods.
I continually experiment with numerous foods and differing amounts of cooking time. This past summer, I tried drying fruit and vegetables in the solar oven. I would love to report the experiment was a success nevertheless, I would not recommend it as an effortless, economical strategy of dehydrating food. The only two downsides to cooking with a solar oven are: number one, no sun equals no cooking and number two, there is no thermostat to control cooking temperature. Because the Sun Oven maintains a continuous temperature of 300-350 degrees F., it is wonderful for cooking or baking almost something. But it is not so great for drying food, since it takes less than 200 degrees to dehydrate food.
I had to continually adjust the angle of the oven reflectors to the sun. It would be fine 1 minute but start off to cook the fruit and veggies the next. You can find just the appropriate position to make the oven reach 145 degrees, but the sun is continually moving. Dehydrating food is supposed to be a income-saving strategy, even so following two hours of wrestling the oven back and forth, the savings was not that appealing to me.
In fact, the fruit cooked rather than dried and baked to the drying racks. I enjoy baked potatoes or squash, but baked mango or papaya? Yuck!
Because that day, I have been diligently experimenting with distinct tactics making use of the Sun Oven, such as propping open the glass door in varying degrees. The dilemma with that was the heat inside the oven was not even consequently neither was the consistency of the finished product.
For this reason I surmised that a fan was necessary to circulate the warm air in and around the food to aid dry it out evenly. Because the entire purpose of a solar oven is to conserve power and use in places exactly where electricity is not accessible, I needed to use a dc fan and power it with a solar panel.
That was the solution. I placed the fan on the tray, propped open the glass door 3/8 of an inch and stacked drying racks using pvc as spacers. Now the hottest air could escape via the crack in the door and the balance of the warm air was circulated evenly about the food by the fan.
Directions on how to construct your own solar oven dehydrator kit along with free recipes can be located on sunovenchef.com. This kit will fit the majority of solar ovens on the industry. I advocate dehydrating food, not your body! And be sure to drink a lot of clean, healthy water day-to-day.

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