Thursday, March 16, 2017

The Solar Oven


So while we are in the experimenting mood, we thought we'd give this a go: building our own Solar Oven. Jasper and Eve took on the challenge and built the oven from a banana box, some OHP film, a car sunscreen shade and a whole lot of tape.

Next we put it out in the sun with a thermometer inside to see how hot we could get it to.

When it first went out it was 25 degrees in the oven. About the same as the air temperature. But as the sun shone on it the temperature rose. After only 5 minutes it had risen to 40 degrees. Then in another 5 minutes it was up to 50 degrees in there. This was amazing. Jasper was calculating how many degrees it went up each minute.

Mrs Rutene checked the temperature at 4pm (about 2 hours after it had been placed in the sun) and it was 80 degrees Celsius in there! Wow!

Jasper wondered if it would make a difference if they insulated the lid?

Many students wondered if it would have gotten hotter if we'd put it out in the sun earlier?

How hot do you think we can get our oven?
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2 comments:

  1. Gladstone Senior HubMarch 16, 2017 at 6:50 PM

    Update: Today (Friday 17th) we put another layer of insulation in the lid of the box and put it out in the sun earlier to see if we could raise the temperature inside. No luck unfortunately. It stayed a more even temperature (ie. didn't rise further than the outside air temperature). Why was this do you think?

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  2. AnonymousMarch 19, 2017 at 2:21 PM

    I think we can get it to 100 degrees

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