Solar Cooking Australia Solar Cookers and Cooking

Sun Cook Solar Cooker

We recently acquired a SunCook solar cooker to test. We were under the impression that it was an Australian oven due to adverts we had seen. Just to clear that up - it is not Australian, but European. Unfortunately this was the only false claim about the oven we had read…UPDATE - It may actually be Chinese.

Unit:
This unit looks great when you first open the box - it's light and dark blue plastic design look quite impressive. As you pull it out of the box you will notice that it is quite heavy though.

When you open it you will realise that a lot of the weight is in the glass lid and that you have to push the button quite firmly to release the lid and glass door independantely.
Here is one of the first major issues with the design of this unit. It gets worse as you use it more - but you will find that if you open the lid all the way back, the whole oven will tip over. You have to lock the little mechanism on the lid to ensure this doesn't happen - try not to forget as we continually did. The clip and whoel arm that holds the glass lid seems very flimsy for the weight of the ild so we don't know how long that will last.

The unit does come with some very thin and cheap looking accessoreis - a pot and a pan. They look like they are coated in Teflon so we won't be using them.

Next you have to install the extra reflector. This is quite fiddly and frustrating. You have to make sure this piece is always the right way, then install it in 3 different places in the right order. This must be done every time you want to pack up or setup the oven - or anytime you want to open the lid fully.

We're not even sure that this reflector has any benefit - unless the sun was at a very low angle. If the rest of the oven were what we were looking for we would likely throw this annoyance away.

Use:

This solar oven performed fairly well in the test we did of this, up against the Global Sun Oven ® The test did favour the SunCook though, a winters day with a few intermittant clouds heating up 2L of water.

The Sun Cook does not achieve the same heat as the Global Sun Oven ® in this test, does not hold the heat for as long either. A large difference can be seen in the water temperature of both.

It is easy to adjust the Sun Cook and it does have good insulation properties, but it is very sensitive to adjustment. It needs to be adjusted very regularly and precisely to get the best temperatures. Even then it doesn't compare very well.

The annoyances of this oven far out weigh it's good points unfortuately. A few designs flaws make it a poor choice for many.

Quality ***
Cooking Size ***
Size / Weight ***
Temperature ***
Insulation ****
Easy of use *
Cost **
0 Comments