Home Is Where the Hearth Is - When Disaster Strikes - page 67

ahead. On the plus side, you can prepare a meal in the morning, set it out to catch the afternoon
sun, and come home to a slow cooked hot meal ready to eat in the evening.
The simplest solar oven is basically an aluminum-foil-covered cardboard box that is tilted
toward the sun and covered with a sheet of glass, or Plexiglas, to let the sun in while also hold-
ing the heat inside. More complex designs include flat or parabolic reflectors to capture more
of the sun's rays than are captured by a simple box. There is a fine article by Joe Radabaugh in
Backwoods Home magazine that has plans and instructions for how to make a simple yet eleg-
ant and efficient solar oven for less than $10 that can be found at ht-
tp://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/radabaugh30.html . Other designs abound on the Inter-
net, or you can purchase a readymade solar cooker from most solar supply houses.
Figure 4-5. An assortment of solar ovens. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Stein Barker
Backup Sources for Power
Without electricity, our air conditioners, furnaces, credit card machines, gasoline pumps, elev-
ators, water heaters, refrigerators, computers, electric lights, and cash registers cease to func-
tion. A few hours after the power goes out, most long-distance automotive traffic runs out of
gas and grinds to a halt. In the event of a prolonged power failure, our gas and water utilities
will also fail. Even pellet stoves will not operate with electricity. Most gas-powered water heat-