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Last edited: 19 May 2025
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Brian White first began solar cooking in October 2006 with funnel cookers designed by Steven Jones. He is away at work all day and so is interested in solar cookers that do not need attention during the day. These must be automatic and track the sun. An accumulating barbecue that stores the heat until he gets home is the ultimate goal.
Brian invented the Mechanical Mathematician to make a parabolic dishes more easily. This device is simple and removes the need for complicated calculations. He hopes to popularise the Tracking Solar Accumulating Barbecue.
News[]
- May 2025: The Sun Scoop - Brian has posted that he will be updating the progress he makes on the Sun Scoop at his Autodesk Instructables channel.
Fresnel style solar tracker, Photo credit: Brian White
- February 2025: Tracking solar cooker project is finalist - Brian White has been notified by Autodesk Instructables his solar tracking device has made it to the final round of judging in the annual competion. He explains his lo-tech design is aimed at gardeners, which he refers to as an untapped market. It can used for sterilizing potting soil and processing weeds and vegetation. They go straight to good mulch in a single day without needing a compost heap. His goal was to simplify the tracking approach traditionally used with Scheffler Community Kitchen systems. Read his submission...
Brian White compares lettuce grown in untreated soil on the left, and solar treated soil on the right after 29 days of growth, Photo credit: Brian White
- October 2024: Garden soil treated in solar cookers - Smaller batches of sterilized soil can be created with solar cookers, typically used for cooking food. Leaving soil for a few hours in the sun should kill pests and weed seeds. Brian White, living in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, has experimented in his garden comparing lettuce grown in untreated and solar treated soil. It is easy to see the plants growing in the solar treated soil exhibit more robust growth. You can watch a video with more detail on Brian White's Facebook page.
- November 2014: Brian White reports: I have a thing in the works for solar drying with calcium chloride as a desiccant. Dry calcium Chloride absorbs water and becomes liquid in the water that it absorbs. It actually has a pretty complex series of Christal hydrates that all absorb water and calcium chloride is cheap and food safe.So, I am planning to use a solar cooker to drive off the water and "recharge" the calcium chloride. My main problem with solar cooking is that I am rarely home during the day. Using a solar cooker to build up a big store of very dry calcium chloride to dry fruit in the fall might be a good idea. Then you put the calcium chloride in a closed solar dehydrator with the fruit and a little fan and the water gets transferred to the calcium chloride, which drips out of the thing as it becomes liquid.I am also looking into making calcium chloride from limestone and brine. It can be made with a solar panel electrolyzing the salt. You get hydrogen and chlorine that you can recombine above in moist limestone chips.This converts some of the calcium carbonate in the limestone to calcium chloride. This might seem like a waste of a solar panel but the industrial process to produce calcium chloride is similar.
Audio and video[]
- May 2025:
See also[]
- Solar tracking
- Clam Shell Changes Draft
- Tracking Solar Accumulating Barbecue
- Compound Parabolic Solar Cooker
- Mechanical Mathematician
- Solar food drying
External links[]
Contact[]
Brian White
Victoria, BC
Canada
Email: gaiatechnician@yahoo.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brian.white.9047506
Skype: brianfrommountneill
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/gaiatechnician