Home solar reports to my Family

Bottom line, it was pretty much as I thought. Direct sunlight works a lot better than indirect sunlight. For example, indirect light makes maybe 0.1 volts in my local setup, but direct sunlight makes like 4 and 5 amps of voltage.

 

So I put out the solar oven out at around 0945 during an indirect solar time, and things were pretty much dead “baking cookies wise”. So I just “nibbled” on the raw cooking dough. Basically, the Hemlocks is good at most things, but the solar orientation sucks, like the front porch only gets direct sunlight in the afternoon. Heck, by then I may have nibbled more cookie dough.

More to come later, especially when the Hemlocks gets direct sun on the front porch and the oven picks up.

Bottom line, the solar oven works OK as long as it gets direct sun. I ended up making sugar cookies yesterday using the solar oven.

Like our cars which need fuel to run, the solar oven needs sunshine to run. So it doesn’t work at night, nor very well with only indirect sunlight.

As a practical matter, here at the Hemlocks it is best used if I can use the sun to get direct sunlight, which I can do after the sun comes up. I call it chasing the sun, which best case means moving it once or twice every hour.

Now if you have a better place than the Hemlocks front porch, then one can put it out in the AM, and have it slow cook during the day, and have a nice meal in the PM, or so is advertised. I haven’t tried that yet.