How To Do it yourself

We've looked at a lot of solar food dryers, from simple ones made with a couple of cardboard boxes to a huge indirect pass-through tower dryer with electronic temperature control built by the Appropriate Technology Program at Appalachian State University, but this design is the cleanest, simplest, easiest to build model we've found so far. And it's more effective than many other complex designs. Whether you are planning on drying fruit slices, making your own beef jerky, or dehydrating vegetables or herbs and spices, this nifty unit will do the job for you.

The author notes that before stumbling upon this design, "... I've tried about every solar dryer design imaginable. The only common factor in all those attempts was their very limited usefulness here in the humid upper Midwest. None of them could reliably turn food into a non-moldy finished product, unlike the many successful electric models I had built for myself and friends." But this design solved that problem. Check it out. You'll be surprised how simple it is.

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"The lack of clean drinking water is a major health problem in the developing world. To reduce this health risk ways of producing clean water at an affordable cost are needed, and people need to be educated about germs and sanitation, lest they accidentally re-contaminate their clean drinking water. Recently, several of us at the University of California at Berkeley have attacked the first of these requirements. ... In this article we describe a new low-cost device that pasteurizes water."

"For those not familiar with the pasteurization process, if water is heated to 149? F (65? C) for about 6 minutes all the germs, viruses, and parasites that cause disease in humans are killed, including cholera and hepatitis A and B. This is similar to what is done with milk and other beverages. It is not necessary to boil the water as many people believe. Pasteurization is not the only way to decontaminate drinking water, but pasteurization is particularly easy to scale down so the initial cost is low."

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Photo: David Monniaux
via Creative Commons Wikimedia This PDF document is the complete illustrated text of The Integral Passive Solar Water Heater Book (ISBN 0933490038). This 104 page (8.2MB) book starts with basic design principles and takes you right through the complete details of plumbing and installation of a passive solar home hot water system. The build-it-yourself chapter even covers such seemingly incidental topics as how to safely get the components up onto your roof.

Having a solar water heater like one of the designs presented in the book, will not only pay for itself in electricity savings in a year or two, but will keep right on delivering hot water even when the power goes out for any reason.

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