Quick solar oven

Step by step instructions showing how to make your own solar cooker from a tire, presented by Upcycle

What you need to make solar oven:

discarded tire
insulation material
tinfoil
sheet of glass or Perspex
duck tape
matt black pot

Step 1

We took our tire and placed it on a old kids play table, this is not necessary but for the sake of ease of moving it around i thought this would make more sense. We did have to put a sheet of Perspex under it as the table was a little too small.

Step 2

Now you have to stuff the tire with your insulation. We have filled the tire scrap material that we had lying around, this makes it pretty heavy but works well. You can also use news paper as a stuffing. The trick is that the material you use has to retain some sort of shape. Make sure that you push the insulation material you are using all the way into the wall of the tire, better you pack it the better the insulation.

Step 3

Once the sides are filled you keep adding material to the base and sides. What you want to make is a shallow bowl with the material in which you will nestle the pot during cooking. The bowl shape will also help with the reflection of the sun onto the pot.

Step 4

Now line the inside of the tire and hollow of the cooker with heavy duty tin foil (aluminium foil) making sure the shiny side is facing up. Make the foil go all the way over the edge of the tire

Step 5

Take your tape or duck tape with and secure the tinfoil to the tire. We used just normal insulation tape so had to go round several times.

Step 6

Before we put the pot in or the glass over the oven we did a temperature test, as you can see we were almost at 35deg c just from a few moments under a winter sun. The ambient temperature on the day was around 24deg c.

Step 7

Now decide on what you going to cook put it into your pot and that in the oven.We have been building this so we can melt our excess wax and make new candles and fire lighters with the scrap wax.

Step 8

Finally cover the tire and pot with your sheet of glass. at the time of covering the initial pot temperature was just on 40deg c. After 1 hour in the sun the temperature was at 65deg c.