Camping and Solar Cooking

...argo bike, we can get fancy with the food and libations, allowing us to skip the usual dehydrated camping chow. These sittin’ around type of trips, or even a lazy Sunday afternoon at home, are the perfect occasion to deploy a solar cooker. Best of all you can build a solar cooker yourself for pennies out of cardboard and aluminum foil. For some foods, such as rice, it’s actually easier to cook with a solar cooker than it is on a stovetop. Put som...

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CooKit Solar Cooker Made Out of Wood

The nice folks at Solar Cookers International gave us permission to reprint plans for their CooKit solar cooker in our book Making It. You can access those plans, as well as many other solar cooker projects, for free, on their website here. I’ve made CooKits out of cardboard and aluminum foil a couple of times. One problem is that I eventually bang up the cardboard and I’ve got to make a new one. This summer I had a lot of  1/4 inc...

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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the...

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Low Tech Solar Heating with a Thermosyphon Collector

Yet another great post from the folks at Build It Solar: a simple and low tech solar heating system called a thermosyphon collector mounted in the wall of a garage. It uses the same principle as the solar dehydrator we have on our garage roof–basically it’s just some clear plastic and a heat collector made out of black window screen. If your climate is cold and sunny (think Colorado) this would work nicely. Read the post to see a r...

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Looking for the Union Label

We’ve got a bad case of Ohrwurm, a German expression translated as “earworm” and used to describe a song stuck in your head. Our earworm came after a search for union made socks and underwear on the internets recalled a highly catchy ad jingle from the roller disco era, “Look for the Union Label” (youngsters can watch it on youtube here). We looked for the union label and we were surprised to find it via a company c...

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Solar Garden Helper Thingy

From the always cool Build It Solar blog, a “garden helper machine” built by Randy, aka “PD-Riverman”. I really Love gardening but I have a bad back and when it comes to staying bent over in the garden it gets rough. So I built this Helper Machine. I  call it My P-Machine. Planting/Picking/Pulling weeds/Putting around the garden machine.  It’s powered by two 12 volt 80 watt solar panels that charge some golf c...

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Street Signs and Solar Ovens

If SurviveLA put together a museum show it would, pretty much, look like an exhibit currently at the Craft and Folk Art Museum entitled “Street Signs and Solar Ovens: Socialcraft in Los Angeles” which is on view until December 31st. Curated by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, this timely show focuses on objects that demonstrate creative, low-tech solutions to the environmental and political mess we find ourselves in. We were pa...

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Sun Boxes: A Solar Powered Public Art Project

It’s not often that my unused music degree intersects with the topic of this blog, but I got an email from Craig Colorusso describing a neat, solar powered public art project that he’s touring the US with called Sun Boxes. From the description on his website: Sun Boxes are an environment to enter and exit at will. It’s comprised of twenty speakers operating independently, each powered by the sun via solar panels. There is a differ...

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Saturday Linkages: Black Soldier Flys, DIY Power Bars and CDFA Thugs are Killing Bees Again

DIY How to Build a DIY Black Soldier Fly Composter (Video) : TreeHugger http://www.treehugger.com/lawn-garden/how-build-diy-black-soldier-fly-composter-video.html … Are You A Chicago Gardener? Take This Survey http://greenroofgrowers.blogspot.com/2013/02/are-you-chicago-gardener-take-this.html#.UTo_UPrAm4A.twitter … My Solar Adventures- DIY solar and arduino projects: How to : DIY Solar Backpack with Solar Mobile phon… http://mysolara...

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Saturday Linkages: The Calm After the Storm

Got a storm damaged tree? See Trees Are Good for advice. DIY Build-It-Solar Blog: A Unique DIY Solar Pool Heating Collector Using PV… http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/10/a-uniq ue-diy-solar-pool-heating.html?spref=tw  … Build-It-Solar Blog: Large DIY Solar Space and Water Heating System in … http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/10/large- diy-solar-space-and-water-heating.html?spref=tw  … Primitive Skills Roland T...

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