Here comes the summer... finally! (solar cooker stage 5)

Those of you who have been following the regular solar cooker updates will know that I have been stressed about the 23rd of July for quite some time...the reason was of course that it is absolutely fine for the Sun to not want to play when its just myself and my colleagues experimenting, but when you have the Eastbourne Council, a Councilor visiting, and the media wishing to interview on the radio and on TV...well lets just say the stakes are a little bit higher.  Thankfully the 23rd turned out to be a gorgeous day and the buzz from people wanting to be part of the experiment as well as the added fun from the media ensured a real success conclusion to our Solar Cooker adventure.

In case you missed previous blog-posts, I shall explain what the project is about.  The Solar Cooker Experiment is a project that utilizes parabolic mirrors to cook food items. We conduct sensory evaluation to measure perceptions of taste, smell and vision of the food items and compare foods cooked on the solar cooker versus traditional methods. There are implications for consumer behaviour, co2 emissions and energy wastage reductions, as well as the opportunity to explore and understand consumer cultures as we depart from a fast food to a slow food philosophy.

There have been 5 stages so far for the experiments.

For the 5th and final stage of the experiment we worked together with Eastbourne Borough Council taking the solar cooker by the Eastbourne Seafront near the Holywell area and attracting quite a lot of interest both from local press and the residents and tourists that happened to pass by.

This link leads to a press release created by COBB PR on behalf of the Eastbourne Borough Council, prior to the event of 23rd July 2012: http://www.cobbpr.com/blog/2012/07/19/sun-sea-and-solar-powered-sausages-on-eastbourne-beach/

BBC Sussex interviewed myself (click here for that interview just skip forward to 1:27:40) and Sovereign Fm run a story covering the event of 23rd July. Furthermore BBC Southeast interviewed us live for their 13:30 news on the 23rd July 2012 and then again showed highlights of the day with my colleague Ken Woodward and I featuring for their 18:30 news.  It was great fun, even more so because my family visited me on site. Here is a picture of me with Ian the BBC interviewer and my daughter coming close to see why is Daddy on TV.

Back to the serious bit and for those of you that are interested in the data.  As you may know academic publications take a while to write and then a bit more to see the light of day! So I promise this is not the end of our friend Dr RA (we nicknamed the solar cooker Dr RA by the way)  as soon as I have an ok from the journal we are targeting with the data I shall publish a blogpost here and share as much information as I can.

Enjoy the Summer everyone...it really HAS ARRIVED!