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.