Homemade Solar Hot Dog Cooker for Your Kid’s School Project
Just think: one day your kid comes home from school and asks you to help with his upcoming school project. The years of school and physics are far behind, so does your science knowledge, so you have no idea what kind of project it can possibly be.
How to impress your kid’s teachers and school pals, get a good grade and at the same teach your kid something useful? Solar Panels Company blog offers you an idea – consider of making a hot dog cooker run on solar energy. Even if you are not an expert in science, you will most likely get it done since this solar hot dog cooker requires minimal efforts and materials to build.
Aside from it, you will have a chance to teach your kids more about the alternative energy that can help the environment and save a bunch of money. So here is how you can make an eco-friendly hot dog cooking appliance.
Materials:
- Long box
- Utility knife
- Aluminum tin foil and poster board or a thin plastic mirror
- 2 wooden dowels
- Drill
- Skewer
- Ruler (to produce the formula for a parabola)
- Tape
- Scissors or utility knife
- Glue
- Hot dogs
Instructions:
- Find the longest box with an open top in your house. The larger it is, the more hot dogs you’ll be able to cook at one time.
- Cut the side parts of your box in a shape of a parabola (half of the oval). Speaking of the parabola formula, let your child figure out the formula and come up with the point of focus on his own. The actual formula for a parabola is Y = X2/(4F), where X is the horizontal distance from the origin, F is the focal distance and Y is the vertical distance to the curve at any point X.
- Cut the poster paper to cover the top of the box with the parabola. Cover the poster board with foil and attach it to the box. Instead of a tin foil, you can use a thin plastic mirror.
So, how does it all work? On a sunny day, the construction should be faced directly at the sun (don’t forget to adjust the cooker as the sun changes its position). To fix the incident sun rays at a certain point where the heating occurs (in our case, this is a hot dog), you need to have the parable-shaped mirror. String 1 or 2 hot dogs on a skewer and wait approximately 6-12 minutes to cook the hot dogs.
By the way, here is another way to use solar energy and complete a school task – homemade solar cells!
The most important part of it is patience. First, it seems like nothing happens to hot dogs, but if you do everything right, the process will go. Don’t forget to rotate the skewer every now and then. As soon as hot dogs are ready, enjoy!
Cooking with a little bit of science is fun, how do you think?