Last post from Puerto Penasco

Tomorrow, Fraser and I are leaving our lovely little R&D center here just as this town starts to come alive again. It's spring break so in the past 2 weeks we've seen more tourists and revelers than we have in the past 4 months!  The days are longer, the air is warm and the mood PP, a very tourism reliant town, is on the rise. 

Last week we donated the Phaeton to the local Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Puerto Peñasco. They have an industrial design program and the professor in charge, Rodrigo, is very excited about the opportunity for students to apply their skills to a real world project with social and environmental benefits. The institute sent a truck and some guys to pick the machine up and then we set up the machine together and I ran a little workshop on how to care for the machine, establish a tight focal point, and make new mirror modules. We're going to be in touch and I'll act as a sort of advisor to any students who take an interest. A few already have. While we were setting up the array quite a few students passed by to gawk at the pot of boiling water and the flaming stick. We sure are glad to see the array going to a good cause!




While we'll be sorry to leave, we have a lot to look forward to. We're taking the scenic route home, and by that I mean we'll be driving up the West Coast to Vancouver where we'll spend a few days and then across Canada, visiting relatives along the way! I'll get to see the town where my grandad grew up, and I'll finally meet a lot of family that I haven't yet had the pleasure of getting to know. We're going to take around 3 weeks to drive back and then we're going to build another Phaeton, this one for demonstrations, and then start hitting up international aid, international development and various philanthropic orgs to mount a project.  


I'll update mid trip with pics of our journey! 

Results! A convenient, inexpensive, high-power solar cooker

Now, I know some of you are saying "But Lorin, didn't you already have a convenient, inexpensive, high-power solar cooker?" And the answer is yes, but this is the convenientest, inexpensivest, high-poweredest yet! Well, not high poweredest, fine, but still. This is a really important development for solar cooking internationally.

This is what it’s all about right here: we’ve finished the core of our new solar cooking system.

I contend that this is one of the simplest, most convenient and most cost effective high power (2kwh) solar cooking solutions.

I’ll go into technical and performance details in a later post but for now just check out the ergonomics and consider the facility of use. Waist high cooking console with a lever to control the mirrors and a ‘rearview mirror’ to peek at the underside of the pot to ensure that the machine is properly oriented. The cooking console is far enough removed from the mirrors that putting up a shade or umbrella will not affect the system. All while harnessing 2kwh of solar thermal energy. Enough to boil 8L of water in 40 minutes.

It’s a simplified version of our old mainstay, the Helios array that we’re calling the Phaeton coupled with something we’ve managed to develop that we’re calling an upward reflector. Thin mirror strips reflect the light upwards and onto the bottom of a cooking vessel, enabling boiling or frying in a traditional manner.

There’s a reason we call these technologies Solar Fire. No new recipes required… the Phaeton will cook anything a fire cooked and more.

The convenience factor matched with the power of the machine and leveraged using the upward reflector means that this is a significant development which helps to overcome a persistent flaw in many solar cookers of this size. Observe the following pictures of larger solar cookers which are in more or less the same size league as ours.

The bigger they get, the less accessible the focal point becomes at certain times of day, or the more extreme the angle of incoming light which hinders some processes like frying. Waist high solar cookers like the Devos cooker at the very right have difficulty exceeding 2 square meters of collector area. Tinytech on the far left has an inexpensive, solid 3 square meter cooker, but the geometry does not favour frying, one cannot install a shade, accessing the pot means shading the reflector, and it cannot operate as early or late. The Phaeton can operate from an hour after sunup to an hour before sunset. In the clear skied tropics you get 8 good hours of solar cooking per day. I have yet to make a big test batch of rice but based on some rough figuring the Phaeton can prepare at least 50kg of rice per day. Instead of rice we’ve been making marmalade and dried pineapples 

Oh, and it costs less than $500 to build.

Designed to be built onsite by local tradespeople the Helios array uses common materials that are off the shelf in nearly every country on the globe.

My grandfather and I want to engage in international aid projects wherever the need is greatest. Aid organizations running camps in Haiti could see these machines work 8hrs a day and pay themselves off in less than a year, reducing fuel budgets and improving health standards by sterilization and improved air quality. Sub-Saharan countries ravaged by deforestation and suffering under the weight of energy poverty can use this free technology to start generating wealth at all levels of society.

Seriously, we’re mounting a project, somewhere, somehow, and we’d love your help.

Solar food dehydrator

If you recall the solar drier prototype from a few posts ago you'll recognize it here, though now paired with our new Helios array.

The Vesta was underpowered so we decided to hook it up with a 35 sq. ft Helios array. 

Fraser administers the 'smoke test' where we place a burning stick at the air intake and count out how long it takes for it to escape through the chimney, giving us a rough idea of airflow. We're running at about 45 cubic feet per minute at a max of 150F. This is OK performance but we've still got some tinkering around to optimize the system. 

This is a test batch of about 10lbs of nixtamalized corn, AKA hominy. Still 

a couple hours of drying time left to go but we're hoping to have a fully 

dried product in a single day of drying. 

By midweek we should be done building 'la piece de resistance', a waist height cooking console with multiple configurations for boiling, frying, baking and roasting! 

Working Hardly

Apparently when it comes to blogging I can take it or leave it. For a while, anyhow. It has been too long since my last post and so I am here to remind you all that we're still working and making good progress. It may not be the kind of progress we originally intended, but progress isn't progress without.. ... progress.

Orange marmalade abounds! We're eating our test batches at the rate of about a liter a week because the stuff is just so good! I'll post the recipe once I can coax it out of grandad. We've made more hibiscus flower jelly (in Mexico hibiscus flowers are called 'flor de Jamaica'. And we made an apple / hibiscus fusion that is very, very fine!

Surely we can't have been making jellies and marmalades all this time, so what have we been up to? Well I took a couple of weeks vacation, enjoying a visit by my friend Aysa from Toronto, I was bedridden for a week by my bad back which took an inexplicable turn for the agonizing, I took it easy for another week just working afternoons and we've taken a total tangent, getting away from the Vesta array and starting in on a new vision for the Helios array including finally solving the problem of the cursed upwards reflector!

So we shifted gears from product development back to where my heart dwells, in technological research and development. booya!

Next post will describe the new Helios, it's advantages as well as our quest to reflect. upwards.

Product development

We've been wrestling with this solar drier for a couple of weeks now and thought it was time to switch things up a little bit. Yesterday being new years day, we weren't in the mood for anything too heavy so we decided to make some jelly.

Until now we had refrained for lack of suitable jars, but we found some decent glass jars that will serve us during the product development phase. I've also placed an order in Mexico's industrial heartland for 500 jars and hot seal tops which will serve us once we've got our recipes. It's a good thing I like toast!

First up: Tamarind jelly.

Here Fraser can be seen testing the jelly to see if it is ready to 'set'. We ended up with just over a liter of delicious, powerful jelly. We're going to try to get our jars into some local stores but regardless we're both going to start eating a lot of toast... :)