With the success of the first tests on the collector, I decided to do more. Really, it is an excuse to go outside and melt stuff. I expanded the holder so I could hold a can. My goal… Boil a can of water. Like the bottle, I spray painted the can black. I grabbed a thermometer out of the kitchen. I got it all hooked up and pulled the dish out into the sun. The thermometer was reading about 82° (ambient) when I put it in the can. The temp dropped to about 73° due to the water. I tried to check on it fairly often. I wanted to check every 5 minutes, but I get distracted fairly easily, and lets just say it didn’t happen. Fortunately digital cameras embed the time of the shots.
I put the can out at about 3:10pm. The temperature came up slower that I had hoped for. But it was a little cloudy, so I was not getting constant heat. At around 3:52 it hit a light boil (205°). So in about 40 minutes the temperature went up 132°. Not bad. I am concerned that the texture that is on the dish may be dispersing some of the light as the foil conformed to it. Also being that the foil is not completely flat from when I glued it down. This is also probably causing a little bit of loss as well. Lastly, the paint I used was a satin, so it had a little bit of a sheen. This probably caused a little bit of loss due to reflection. But again this is an experiment, and why do we experiment?
| 82° at 3:09pm | 78° at 3:15pm | 145° at 3:27pm |
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| 190° at 3:35pm | 201° at 3:40pm | 205° at 3:52pm |
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