Festival Update
It’s still way too early to post a tentative calendar of confirmed events, presentations, livestreams and online workshops. With eighteen days to fill no single day is spoken for—yet. At the risk of implied promises, here are many of the topics, panels, events we are aiming to fill those 2.5 weeks with, from all corners of the globe:
Five days set to focus on one cooker type each day: Panel, Box, Parabolic, Vacuum Tube, and all else — e.g., Fresnel Lens and Hybrid Cookers. For each, all the makers and designers of cookers archived on the Wiki will be invited to share their inspirations behind the designs, and practical ways to make or use them.
Several from my growing list of contacts would like to livestream their own solar cooking experience, ranging from the back yard neighbor get together to wholesale solar cooking pot lucks. These could range from an hour to a whole afternoon, depending on the volume of solar cooks, cookers deployed, and visitors stopping by.
Panels covering topics such as:
Solar PV-to-Electric-Cookers and their place in goals addressing climate change, deforestation, and public health concerns arising from fossil fuels, wood smoke, and undrinkable water sources…
Integrated cooking with rocket Stoves and Haybaskets/thermal cookers...
How you can promote solar cooking as an individual, or with an informal philanthropic effort, or by joining established solar cooker promoting organizations? In my travels and zoom calls I’ve found there are many different ways individuals can make a difference, from one cooker at a time to establishing proven shipping logistics for hundreds in one boatload…
Nonprofit vs. For Profit vs. Open Source vs. Distributed Entrepreneurship— Each organizational structure and strategy has its place. Does it depend on the type of cooker one is promoting? The region where it’s being offered?
I’ll be recruiting veteran solar cooks to tag team with me on several sessions of “Ask A Solar Cooking Geek.” If we don’t have answers, we’ll sift through the SCI Wiki, the dark web, heck even the sunny web to track down the best information we can share. These will be live on zoom, any/all welcome to log in and ask questions, or get ready to be called from the bench if you have a better answer than we can come up with.
By virtue of signing up for this newsletter, you are registered for the entire Festival and Conference. As the above topics and activities fill up the calendar with commitments, you’ll be the first to know.
A solar cooking camel’s nose in the passive solar tent
Last September, the National Ambient Energy Builders Research Symposium hosted dozens of passive solar architects, builders, and “ambient energy” power users. The Symposium played out over three days at the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu New Mexico. When the University of Louisville announced the conference last spring, I snookered my way in, with the dumb luck to be the only presenter submitting a rundown of the many options that passive solar builders had to promote solar cooking.
My slideshow with animated GIFs, A Solar Thermal Cooker In Every Home: Through-The-Wall, Window Insert, and Balcony Solar Ovens, was well received but it dawned on me after the event was over, that most in attendance were researchers, or retired from the building trades. Yet many connections were made, and some I met there have plans to set up solar cooking demos at eco-tourist destinations and/or passive solar complexes.
Credit to Brian Robinson with the U of L’s J.B. Speed School of Engineering for recording the proceedings and sharing them with participants. He hopes to post them all on the NAEBRS page at UL soon. Also credit to Keith Sharp of U of L, who along with Brian and a team of volunteers assembled this very informative conference. Lastly, if you need captions, I need to edit the the transcript, it’s mostly OK, but with occasional major goofs.
Pearl Mast & David Omick make “the big time.”
David and Pearl, solar cooks and off-grid living for decades, graciously set aside time three years ago to chat at their secluded desert home. Their permanent solar oven in the yard, is one to copy for properties with sun hitting the same spot most of any given day. We talked about that home with a focus on their cooker. They even let me come back! Well I beat one of the more prominent youtubers to their slice of paradise, Kirsten Dirksen, who recently featured them on her channel. It is a spectacular, comprehensive tour of their utterly sustainable property and lifestyle.
Join the Network in Real Time
I’ll host the next of my occasional Solar Cooking Forum’s on Zoom, usually I set up time for do-it-yourselfers on one Saturday, and the next for cooker manufacturers, distributors and promoters. This time both groups can log in to meet their solar peers and share any new DIY designs, innovations in cookers being manufactured, or recent successes in solar cooker promotion.
So mark your calendars, May 23 2026 11am Central Time (Chicago) and email me for the Zoom link & password!
Feel free to “lurk” although I’ll make the educated guess that if you signed up for this newsletter, you already have a cooker or two, are selling a unique and powerful cooker, or have put some windshield reflectors into service for your family meals.
India reconsiders LPG, but forgets about solar thermal for cooking.
No objection to the Indian government helping families transition from fossil fuels, but oil company sponsors of rooftop solar and subsidized induction cookers are in no hurry to let on that solar thermal is a great option, starting up often at a fraction of the cost of electric cookers and the solar generated electricity itself—which they still pay for. Us ever forward-looking solar thermal advocates have often said, “The powers that be can’t put a meter between us and the sun”—but with these schemes, those powers have come close.
Choose your segue way into start cooking
Recently a post to the Solar Cookers World Network, featured a Sun Oven, the legendary box cooker, offered for sale. One reason many hesitate to commit their household budget to buying a cooker is the perceived high cost of purchasing a commercially fabricated cooker. The prices rise and fall based on the common materials used to produce them: Plastic shells for box cookers will cost more to make as oil prices escalate. Pricing for aluminum framing and reflectors may rise with an increased demand or supply chain problems slowing shipments to the makers. If price is the object, one can do a lot worse than surfing the main e-tailers that sell used cookers or which include manufacturer’s accounts. This recent posting to eBay, for example, includes “pre-owned” (not necessarily used!) Sun Oven for a price lower than what it cost a few years ago, or close to that old price when shipping is added.
Beyond eBay, occasional used cookers will show on Amazon, Alibaba, Temu, etc. “Buyer beware,” of course. But used can equal high value.
Other way to gently enter the solar cooking world is of course to Do-It-Yourself. SCI’s wiki has dozens of plans for most cooker types, often materials accumulated in your home shop or garage or even sewing nook will be enough to create a cooker from those plans. Probably the easiest entry-level model is the reflective panel cooker.
Pick any one of the many plans there, scrounge your inventory of half-empty aluminum foil rolls and cardboard before you recycle it, borrow some wood glue from your kid’s school backpack—and you’re in business.
Miscellany
Great art, but is it a solar cooker?
The folks @SolarCookingGermany have created a “LyteFire Lite”!
Well, they don’t call it that, but concept is the same: Send the business end of a long focal cone from a very shallow parabolic, into a sealed up cookbox for high heat cooking. Just don’t step between the Balrog and his lunch.
Looking forward to the next two weeks, visiting several solar cooks but also attending the American Alliance of Museums’ Expo in Philadelphia. I’ll continue to lure solar cooks into the schedule for September’s Festival
Luther museum@bigbluesun.net
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