The first visible results

Anna is casting  a spoon

We are melting and casting tin and it works just fine! We’ve adapted a small ceramic oven into a tin kiln, and improved it's functioning. Within half an hour the oven reaches the needed temperature of 335 degrees, enabling us to start with the casting of tin. We heat it well above it’s melting temperature of 230 degrees, so we can cast for a longer period. We have done various experiments, such as casting shells and making medals.

We are gaining quite some skills in mold making, although it is a slow process. From everything that doesn’t go right we learn a bit. For example, Anna is making the fifth mold already for a spoon. Even though we have quite some experience in making molds, it is truly an art.

The result of the experiment, the sugarspoon before finishing

And we have set our temperature record again, 528 degrees in our tin kiln! And we measured 670 near the entrance point of the sunlight. With the current mirrors these are great results. We found out about two weeks ago that the mirrors we use do not reflect enough. Somewhere around 30 percent of the capacity of what this principle can gather in optimal conditions. This is one of the most important findings we’ll take with us in our next design. 


Ceramics and glass therefore didn’t work out yet, but with what we have now we are able to do many other things. And the goal of making glass and ceramics continues to be a powerful incentive for creating solar ovens of great quality.

528 degrees celcius in our tin kiln, more than enough for casting

Anna is enjoying the food we made in our solar wok

But there is more than ceramics and glass, and with the next prototype, we also look forward to do delicious and easy cooking. Just because we like it so much. The vegetables we fried with the solar wok last week tasted great! And we imagine that tasty eco fries, fried by the sun just smell and taste fantastic, don’t you think? We would love to do it at festivals! Well we’ll see how things flow…

Looking back on the whole process of the past few months, we have seen so much, learned so much and got many results. For now we are completely satisfied. Many of our findings aren’t or not yet visible, and a lot of them will appear in the following model solar oven.

The beauty of our stay here is that we have experienced that the principle works. Though not quite as expected, we see that it is viable. And that means we can continue further. This was what remained to be done and is why we travelled to Portugal. We are very happy that we could do this test period, with the support of many lovely people. 


More to follow next year…