Solar Slow Cookers

After David Piper started selling the solar slow cooker he invented more than twelve years ago, he wondered where his clients would use their electricity-free cooking tool. He assumed families would most frequently use the slow cooker while camping, or on rustic trips away from home. Instead, after sending out a marketing questionnaire, Piper found that most families used the slow cooker at home. “No one wants to heat the kitchen up in the summer when it’s ninety degrees outside,” Piper said from his home in Kent, Washington, south of Seattle. “People use the cooker outside so they can keep their homes cool and still have a nice meal.  And if you keep the solar cooker near your garden, full of piping -hot chocolate fondue, you won’t have any trouble getting help with the weeding.”

Piper got the idea for his slow cooker in the seventies when his children were young and solar energy was first being pushed as a way to get the US off the oil grid. The US was in the middle of gas rationing, Piper said. “Mother Earth magazine had all sorts of plans for ways to use solar energy.” He tried making more primitive versions of solar ovens with cardboard boxes covered in foil, but after the first rains, his solar oven would start to decompose. He gradually came up with a design based on a plastic material. Piper negotiated a good deal with a manufacturer and since 1997 he has sold more than ten thousand solar cookers. His solar slow cookers sell in close to ten different magazines ranging from Yellowstone Trading Company to Preparedness Industries. He also sells them from his website solarslowcooker.com.

South of the US Mason-Dixon Line, the solar cookers can be used year round, but in the Northwest, where the sun loses strength during the winter, the cookers can only be used from April to September, Piper said. “They do make more expensive models that are better insulated and have larger reflectors. Those will work year-round in the US. But my cooker was meant to be a low cost, easy-to-use model.”

Piper said that worldwide the most popular use for slow cookers is to sterilize water in developing countries. Many people think you have to boil water to sterilize it, but most pathogens are killed at one hundred and fifty degrees, Piper said. Putting a glass bottle filled with water out in the sun kills eighty percent of the bugs in the water, and then if you add a reflector, you can kill ninety to ninety-five percent of water-borne pathogens. “One of the biggest causes of child and infant mortality is unclean water,” Piper said.

Piper’s solar slow cooker comes with the reflector and one cooking bag. Cooks can use any two to three-quart covered baking dish they have on hand. “Smaller amounts cook faster than larger dishes,” Piper added. His cookers sell for twenty- two dollars apiece and the low price includes both shipping and handling. Piper works full time as an electrician for a Seattle-based company and sells his cookers as a side business where he makes anywhere from fifty to one-hundred dollars a week in sales. For information on ordering, recipes, and links to instructional videos go to http://www.solar-slow-cooker.com