Solar Oven

Named for the ancient Greek God of the sun, the Helios solar array (or Sun Oven) is a village scale or small commercial scale horizontal solar concentrator. It can be built from common steel beams, mirrors, glue, nuts and bolts and the cost depends on where it is built and how the materials are gathered.

Characteristics

• 3000 watts
• 950°C
• can heat an oven 60x60x60 cm to 300°C in 15 min
• cook bread, meat, pizza... roast coffee, cocoa, peanuts... also ceramic...

Until now we can only talk about DIY but you can look at Local Production if you want to start.

DIY Sun Oven have been build in Texas (see Ray Menck’s blog), in Mexico to roast cocoa beams, twice in Mali to be a collective bread oven and in Canada. Please watch Sun Oven Images.

Description The Helios solar concentrating array is designed to provide a large quantity of high quality heat energy ( 3kw peak at 950°C). The Helios offers many versatile applications suitable for a village or small commercial entrepreneur.

Seen here, the Helios is equipped with a bread oven. We have developed numerous other applications for the Helios, including a roasting oven for coffee, peanuts, cocoa beans, chilies, etc, a water purifier which boils, UV pasteurizes and distills water, and a charcoal carbonizer which burns wood or biomass in the absence of air and breaks it down into liquids, gases and charcoal.

The interior of the oven seen here measures 70cm x 70cm x 70cm and reaches 300°C in about 15 minutes.

Construction guides

• Construction Guide pdf, current version
• Construction guide pdf, previous version
• Image gallery: Pictures, Drawings, Details

At the local level the building process of Solar Fire is extremely simple:

• 1. Build a square frame,
• 2. Mount it on a post so that the frame can rotate around it vertically,
• 3. Build some rows and mount them on the frame while allowing them to rotate horizontally,
• 4. Build some reflectors and put them on the rows so that they reflect onto the target,
• 5. Turn concentrator to face the sun and turn rows to reflect onto your target.
• 6. Heat something.

None of these steps requires any sophisticated calculations more complicated than arithmetic nor any software.

See Services and the Store for assistance adaptating to Mass production.

However, for simplest method, the setting of the mirrors has to be done by hand and eye, 2 joints connecting each mirror to their row is thus required in order to be able to set the mirror empirically. This isn’t a problem if you are do-it-yourself, only when you wish to export a setup-and-go machine.