Customer Reviews

Heaven's Flame: A Guide to Solar Cookers

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a book about the heavens flame solar cooker. It tells how to make the cooker in great detail. It also has a wealth of great information on many aspects of solar cooking such as the history of solar cooking, solar cooking tips, and ideas on how to make your own solar cooker design. I greatly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in cooking with the sun.

This is the best solar box cooker design you can build- there's no reason to build it out of cardboard (though you'll want to use cardboard as insulation like he recommends), and it can be made out of scrap plywood, to be quite long-lasting.

I've lived with this cooker for several years, and they will reach very high temperatures for a box cooker, at least compared to the one-reflector-panel designs that are also common. We've even managed to burn food in them before- not an easy feat for a box cooker (you won't burn stuff if you follow the standard directions, we were experimenting to see how hot we'd get it while making cookies).


some innovations:
-the cardboard design he promotes is very well-built and stands up to quite a long use, though you wouldn't want to leave it in the rain for very long.

-The reflector panel shapes (and reflector angle) that Radabaugh recommends help direct more sunlight into the box than square panels do, and also help stiffen the unit so that the panels are less likely to bend with time or abuse. This is just one of the many unique innovations that he's contributed to solar box cooker design.

-carboard is am amazing insulative material for this application. Best yet, it's free.

I wound up using mine mostly for long-cooking foods like beans, and I tend to heat up the water on the regular stove and then put the food/hot water into the solar oven to complete cooking. On a sunny day, or if I rotate the oven once to follow the sun on a marginal sun day, the beans then finish cooking in the same amount of time as stovetop cooking (and no, you can't burn them if cooked this way, unlike a stovetop pot).

If you're not used to cooking outside I'd recommend adding a digital timer or alarm inside your kitchen that reminds you that you've got something cooking out there.

This is a fantastic book on how to get into solar cooking. Extremely well written and organized it answers any questions I can think of for solar cooking. It describes the very simple construction of a solar cooker, and reviews many other designs as well. There is nothing outdated about the book and it makes finding information about solar cooking even easier than searching for it online in many cases.

Joe Radabaugh has designed a great solar cooker and written a great book about it. You can find an excerpt of the book online by searching for Joe's name on the Solar Cooking Archive.