Dad helps kids invent solar oven for third world

Cool dads are the ones who spend time with their kids playing and creating stuff. REAL cool dads are the ones that help their kids change the world. And Jon Bohmer is a REAL cool dad. Working with his two girls, Jon has created a solar oven out of about five dollars worth of cardboard, foil, and acrylic which can generate so much heat, it can bake bread and even boil water using nothing but the Sun. How cool is that? Here’s how it works…

With two cardboard boxes, Jon paints the inner box flat black and wraps the outer box in aluminum foil. Then, he slips the black inside the foil and covers it with the acrylic sheet and points it towards the sun. This setup concentrates and captures enough heat to create temperatures in excess of 350 degrees and it does it without burning so much as a stick of wood – which contributes to deforestation and global warming.

Scouts have been creating cardboard ovens for years, but not with a solar capability. Just by harnessing the power of the sun in a way that would make any Scout proud, Bohmer’s device will boil water and cook food which will save millions of lives who die from drinking contaminated water.

The Invention – which Bohmer said took an afternoon to create and costs less than $5 in materials – won the FT Climate Challenge award for the “most innovative and practical solution to climate change.”

Hat Tip – CNN

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3 Comments on “Dad helps kids invent solar oven for third world”

Enoch Henderson Says:

This is not a new invention… I bought one of these solar ovens a while back, they have been used for years in poor areas, and the only thing this guy did is replicate the idea with cheap stuff. Is it considered an invention if I just recreate something that exists with old cheap stuff? Hmmm, how could I get an award… make an iPhone out of duct tape & old wires?

Shannon Carr-Shand Says:

Re Climate Change Competition winner – clarification

Thanks for all the comments regarding the Kyoto Box winning the FT Climate Challenge Competition. There have been a few posts pointing out that the solar-powered oven is not a new idea. The point of the competition was not to reward a eureka moment but to help an innovative approach to climate change reach the market. As Kyoto Energy founder and competition-winner Jon Bøhmer acknowledges in his company literature and on his application, the concept of solar cooking has been around since the eighteenth century.

There are other versions of solar cookers available on the web and there are also detailed explanations of how to make a version of a similar device. What distinguishes this approach is that the cooker will be mass-produced cheaply in existing factories, the finished item is to be flat-packed for bulk transportation to end users and is extremely cheap at $6.

The $75,000 prize money is going to enable Kyoto Energy to test durable, plastic versions of the cooker with 10,000 people currently burning fossil fuels to clean their water and heat their food. The expert judges and the thousands of members of the public who voted for the Kyoto Box agreed that this simple idea offered the best opportunity amongst the five short-listed ideas for an innovation to help tackle climate change on a big scale.

Please see the press release and our site for more information on the competition and its objectives.

Shannon Carr-Shand, Forum for the Future

Eamonn Says:

Now that’s a cool dad, build me a cooker! Pls

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