Translations:Insulated Solar Electric Cooker (ISEC)/10/en

ISECs Designs -- Your Options

The two types of cookers we have developed at LEF are bucket cookers and box cookers. The bucket cooker we call Perl is made with a 5 gallon bucket and perlite. The Cal Poly crew has expanded on this idea by using larger buckets with more insulation. For a small cooker, Perl works well. It is cheap and easy to build. It uses a stainless pot that can be removed from the cooker and can be any size up to about 6 quarts. The heat source is a homemade burner. It is also possible to build a bucket cooker can be built with wood ashes, though that’s not a great approach. Instructions follow. Our favorite cookers are Roxes -- box cookers made with rockwool sheet and sheet metal. Roxies can be built in many different sizes and insulation levels using rockwool and/ or fiberglass. Naturally, larger ISECs or ISECs with thicker insulation levels cost more. Roxies can use pots that you already have in your kitchen.

Safety: The reader should note that any device that can cook can also start a fire. At LEF, we build our cookers entirely out of non-flammable material, so the cooker itself cannot burn. But the reader should be aware that ISECs, like any cooking technology, carries some risk of fire and burns to the user. A more extensive discussion of fire risks is at the end of this document. We are pleased to share as much information as we have at our disposal, but if you build your own ISEC, you proceed at your own risk.