Solar Ovens - 2

I thought more about solar ovens. This morning is a very sunny day in late July in Mongolia suitable for cooking. Though our current apartment is not an earthship, it has windows facing directly south. At 9AM the sun was directly east and didn't reach even in the corner of the windows, though it was full sunshine outside. 

So in order to use a solar oven, it has to be facing the sun probably outside unless there is wide window almost facing directly to the sun with a table of some sort. If you have regular windows that are about 1 meter wide, it still would be challenging to catch nearly full sunlight indoors over the course of an hour. With very wide earthship windows maybe it's very likely in the middle of the day until afternoon, but not if it's 7AM or even 5PM in summer, unless it works at low level with non-direct sunlight. The obvious solution is to carry it outside. 

One guy on youtube has a cardboard box on a cart. He got temps as high as 290F with ordinary aluminum foil and a cardboard box around 19F. That means with quality materials it might have been hotter. There was another youtube video of a woman in Michigan who cooked caserole in late December in a pot. It worked throughout the whole day. In Mongolia it can easily be -30F outside in January, thought usually not at noon. It could be below 0F for a week or 2. From late October to early April it's basically below freezing 99% of the time. One point is that to cook and even try to use an oven outside, you have to go outside when it's -20F or even 0F. But if it's warm months and we're in an earthship and we go outside in the front yard, it's entirely possibly for most meals, except cooking french fries. Also, if the cook is not enthusiastic about it, it might not work if the cook has habitual ideas about cooking. But if it's January not only is the cooking time more limited, but even if you can cook outside in -20F, but you have to go outside to attend to it. Also, there will be cloudy times when we need to cook that we need an alternative. Even during the day, and even if it worked well enough in -30F (let's say very good model), there will be dark cloudy moments and times at 11PM when people want to cook. We just need different stoves. Hopefully we can run a little off the solar batteries like say 30 minutes a day to augment or use propane gas or a regular wood/coal stove.

This aspect is solved in my mind. If we move, then maybe we'll take the door frame we bought recently and make a solar pizza oven like in that video.