John Grandinetti’s Solar Oven

   If you have been watching the news the last day or so, you have probably seen the story about John Grandinetti from Honolulu HI., and his solar oven. His oven is a bit of a twist on the standard solar oven. Instead of just being basically a box that focuses light on whatever you’re cooking, his oven focuses light on a tube of cooking oil, heats it up and that does your cooking for you. Its a pretty clever design that appears to be based around the same concept as a parabolic trough for large scale electricity.

Mr. Grandinetti’s oven can be made for about $21 dollars and here’s the kicker: he is giving it away. He doesnt want to sell the plans, he wants a company to take it and mass produce it for third world countries so that forests won’t need to be cut down for things like cooking fires. A noble idea indeed. It will be interesting to see if any company, anywhere steps up and takes him up on his offer.

John Grandinetti is a solar contractor out of Honolulu, and the owner of Grand Solar Inc. This isn’t his first forray into the solar cooking/pasturization field. He also has created similar devices for the purpose of pastuerizing water in the late 90’s for third world installations in Tanzania and Guatemala. http://solarcooking.org/safewater2.htm

Personally, I think that if he actually does just give away the plans for mass production, he should be somehow rewarded. In this day and age when people are selling bottled tap water for 5 times what it costs, for a guy to be giving away what appears to be a very lucrative set of plans, primarily just to better someone else’s life, well thats pretty special in my opinion.