Day 25 of our Green Year: Building A Solar Cooker

Hey everyone,

Day 25 has come and it was a big one. To start, we took to task to build a solar cooker that would allow us to barbecue outside during the summer by using free and renewable energy; the sun. The solar cooker was built mostly by Layla who has a knack for these kinds of things. She was able to put it together using just reflective material, electrical tape and cardboard.
We tested it outside and within about 20 min it was over 200 degrees so we hope it works all right.
We will be posting up the steps to build the cooker soon and they will be displayed on a link to the side. Then you will be able to make the cooker yourself.
To build the whole thing, we did not spend over $20 so it is very affordable. We will post pics soon of how well it worked cooking. It may need fine tuning but overall it looks like it will work pretty well.

Also, thank you to Kate Webb from The Province newspaper here in B.C. This is a big paper and they were nice enough to do a story on us, which will appear on Tuesday. Kate also provided me with some links to other individuals who are living the green life:
No Impact Man - http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
Green As A Thistle - http://greenasathistle.com/

We should be using some ideas from those sites as well for our green initiative.

Stay tuned everyone as we begin to go more and more in-depth with the things you can build and use to help you go greener. We are hoping to make this an all encompassing year and want to cover everything, so thank you all for visiting.

Day 18 of our Green Year: Cooking Green

We have come to Day 18 of our Green Year and we move to the kitchen for our next bit of green change in the Baird household.
We know that the fridge and stove are big power consumers in the household. There is not much we can do about the fridge right now except upgrade it to an Energy Star appliance, but with the stove Layla and I have endeavored to use it as little as we can; instead, choosing to use a hot plate grill that allows us to cook nearly anything we need without ever using the stove. It uses much less power than the stove and in some ways, does a much better job.

Another thing we are doing is cutting down on the energy waste of our cookware. When we are cooking a little bit food, we won't use a large pot because the water takes longer to heat up and that means more work on the stove to do it. Instead, we are going to be using pots that are sized perfectly for what we need. We will also be upgrading our cookware so that it has a flat bottom, which provides more contact with the burner and allows it to cook the contents faster. We also will not be cooking anything on a burner that is larger than the pot; this is just a huge waste of energy.

We mentioned yesterday about solar cookers, which we will be building on our own and displaying, that will help us cut down on the use of the stove. Coupled with our reliance on the small grill, we will save quite a bit of energy in the kitchen simply by cooking smart and with the environment in mind.