Making a solar cooker

I have been missing using my oven. Its just not practical in this 5th wheel, it just plain gets too hot. The coolest we have been able to get it in here when its 99 or above is 81, until today, but more on that later.

I was thinking and pondering on what I could do about my problem of not being able to bake, and hardly even able to cook because of the heat. Should I buy an electric stove and put it somewhere outside the camper? No, it already looks hillbilly enough around here according to my kids. If I put one in the storage trailer it would just heat it up in there and I would have a hard time keeping an eye on anything that was baking.

Finally I remembered solar cooking. So today I put together a solar cooker much like the one in the picture and have two sweet potatoes baking right now. We already had the sun shade, and a very small portable grill so I just folded the shade into a shape like the one in the picture, put a few pieces of packing tape in strategic places, placed it in one of the big buckets I use to rinse my clothes when doing laundry. Placed the bucket on the wagon with the shade inside. I then put the small grill which is black down into the funnel shape and placed the rack on top. I went inside and washed two sweet potatoes and wrapped them in foil just like I would if I were going to cook them in a regular oven. I poked a couple of holes in the foil and placed the potatoes on the rack.

Now I will see in a few hours how well my oven works. According to the directions I found I should go outside every hour or two and turn the oven to point directly at the sun. That's part of the reason I put the whole contraption in the wagon so I could move it around as needed.

If this works I will continue to experiment and cook outside for free and not have to heat up my house. How cool is that? No pun intended.

I will update on how this all works out.

~~~~~~Now about doing something to keep it cooler in here.~~~~~~

Last year we invested in window shades that attach to the outside of the windows and reflect something like 80% of the heat. They work but here in Texas the 20% heat left over is stifling.

I figured if the solar sun shades work in the car they could work in here so now all the windows except two small ones at each end of the slide out have the window shades on the outside and solar shades on the inside. I do not like not being able to see out but you cant have everything. Right now it is 96 outside and 78 inside. If this keeps up into the afternoon hours we will know that it helps. If we had a carport over the top of the camper that would really help but that is not in our future so you deal with what you have.