GoSun: Portable solar oven cooks food in as little as 10 minutes

Solar cooker

The recently unveiled GoSun Stove is a portable, tube-shaped solar oven that’s billed as being powerful enough to cook a full meal, even on cloudy days.

Much like the Solar Kettle, this solar cooker uses parabolic mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a glass cylinder and cook the contents inside. But while the Solar Kettle was built for heating up beverages and boiled eggs, the GoSun Stove sports a slightly larger set of mirrors and a stainless steel tray for food, allowing it to act as a portable convection oven for baking, frying, boiling, and more.

The central cooking tube is made from borosilicate glass, which is resistant to thermal shock, and has a vacuum beneath the surface to insulate the interior. The inside of the tube is lined with copper, stainless steel, and aluminum nitrile to better absorb and conduct heat from the sun’s rays. Altogether, the tube measure 2 ft (0.6 m) in length and 2.25 in (5.7 cm) in diameter, giving it enough room for 3 lbs (1.4 kg) worth of food or 53 oz (1.6 l) of liquid. A set of aluminum stands holds the stove firmly in place and can be tilted downward, making it easier to dispense coffee and other hot beverages.

Once it’s been unfolded and aligned with the sun, the mirrors are designed to concentrate light on the center tube for hours as the sun moves across the sky. After taking about 10 minutes to pre-heat, the stove’s cooking time depends on the type of food being prepared and the intensity of the sunlight at the moment. On a clear, sunny day, it’s said to be capable of cooking six hot dogs in about ten minutes and it’s still effective in cloudy conditions, taking about two hours to bake a tray of muffins. The developers claim to have recorded temperatures as high as 700°F (371°C) inside the oven, but they say it tends to cook best between 200°F (93°C) and 550°F (288°C). The stove also includes a sliding tray with a heat-resistant handle, allowing cooks to add or remove food at any time.

Aside from its tubular design, what really sets the GoSun Stove apart from most solar cookers is its portability.

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