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Discoblog
« Want No-Cut Brain Surgery? Use Ultrasound Waves
Pentagon’s New Plan to Rain Down Painful Beams From the Sky »

How to Turn a Papasan Chair Into a Solar Cooker

cookerRemember those cookies that were baked on the dashboard of a car? Well, now someone who’s extra-crafty has upped the ante by converting a papasan chair into a solar cooker.

The apparatus is made of a reflective cone that consists of triangles of anodized aluminum bolted together in the center, which fits into the frame of the chair. There’s even a bamboo tripod to hang the food or water that the reflective cone will cook.

This idea comes from Appropedia, a site dedicated to sharing ideas and knowledge about sustainability. According to the author:

My hope was that, in the spirit of synergy, the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts and that people may find the idea of owning a solar cooker more practical if they can also sit and read a book in it when its not in use.

Compared to the traditional mono-functional Parabolic Solar Cooker, this project serves as a chair when not in use, which saves space and is less of a fire hazard than the traditional Parabolic Solar Cooker.

The site has a DIY guide to crafting your very own papasan chair-solar cooker. Sounds pretty sweet… just be sure not to sit on the hot aluminum cone.

Related Content:
Discoblog: How to Make Solar Chocolate Chip Cookies on Your Car Dashboard
Discoblog: Cooking in Space: Slow, Mediocre, and Dangerous
Discoblog: The World’s First “All Synthetic” Meal Graces a Five-Star Table

Image: Bart Orlando

Share

July 22nd, 2009 3:06 PM Tags: alternative energy, baking, solar power
by Allison Bond in Pollution Solutions (& Disasters) | 4 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

  • http://drvitelli.typepad.com Romeo Vitelli

    Papasan is going to be pissed when he finds out what happened to his chair.

  • http://www.appropedia.org Papasan

    Papasan can still sit in his chair… now he is just in the hot seat.

  • MartyM

    Now I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of mine!!!

  • http://www.uberreview.com/2009/08/diy-make-a-solar-cooker-from-a-papasan-chair.htm DIY: Make a Solar Cooker From a Papasan Chair » The UberReview

    [...] moved to catch sunlight. It is a clever build and it works, check out Appropedia for more details. [Discover Magazine] Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for the latest on [...]





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      Discoblog also includes the daily feature NCBI ROFL, in which two prone-to-distraction grad students post real scientific articles with funny subjects. Email your tips to ncbirofl [at] gmail.com. Follow the ROFL feed here.

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