Poyourow demoing her solar cooker design

There’s no one size fits all solution when it comes to the world of solar panel cookers. All have their advantages and disadvantages. I got an email from author Joanne Poyourow, leader of the amazing Los Angeles Environmental Change Makers, with a simple and effective design she came up with.

Pouyourow’s cooker comes together much faster than the CooKit design that I blogged about earlier this week. There’s hardly any cuts to make and no glue needed. Her design makes use of a car sunshade which can be picked up cheap at your local 99¢ store. The sunshade is more durable than aluminum foil glued to cardboard. While you can also fashion a sunshade alone into a solar panel cooker, I’ve found that they don’t stand up well in even a moderate wind.

Plans for Poyourow’s cooker can be found here (pdf).

She also has a list of solar cooking resources here.

And yes, for most North Americans this is the wrong time of year to be blogging on this topic since, as the sun gets lower in the horizon, solar panel cooking season is almost over. But I’ve got a backlog of summer R&D to share. Stay tuned for the ups and downs of our summer gardening, a bike accident story and a taste test of beer made with our homegrown hops . . .