No Sun? Buy a GoSun Fusion stove and live better
The GoSun Fusion likely won’t save the Earth, however the design thinking behind it could.
GoSun has been our GoTo solar cooker since we first tried what they now call the GoSun Sport. I believed it was a brilliant design, employing the tubes developed for solar water heaters to focus the sun for cooking. But the tube was quite small and limited what you could cook. Then we tried the GoSun Grill, using a big custom-made evacuated tube which was a lot easier to cook with, but it was big and heavy. Neither of these worked nicely when it got during the nighttime severely cloudy or, obviously.
© GosunUnlike design, which takes years and where each building differs, the fantastic thing about industrial design is that designers have the chance to keep learning, improving and adapting the same concepts. The GoSun team are moving Goldilocks here; the very first design was a bit small, the perhaps a bit the GoSun Fusion, and also this one, seems just right. It’s blowing Kickstarter at this time, just like its predecessors did.
There’s another quality of the GoSun Fusion. The GoSun stoves are exceptional for the special coatings which trap heat inside, and also their tube which acts like a bottle. And as super-insulated houses don’t need heat to stay warm, a tiny super-insulated stove doesn’t need heat .
/through
The GoSun Fusion has a 150 watt heating element built into the cook plate. That’s not a lot of heat, just the equivalent of 1.5 old-style Kenner Easybake ovens using their 100 watt incandescent bulbs.
It’s a perfect example this TreeHugger’s mantra: Reduce Demand instead of rising distribution. It is also an illustration of the type of design thinking that we need. They do it with “ultra-efficiency”:
- Reduce Power Consumption – you would need a generator for most ovens
- Reduce Weight – less power to fuel the toaster, means less material to take
- Maintain Heating and Dampness – meals stay warm and hot for hours thanks to vacuum insulation and high-temp silicone seals
- Off-Grid – that the Fusion can be powered by a PowerBank that fits in your pocket
That is we should be designing houses and cars, not just solar stoves.
Years ago companies invested serious money creating also the coatings which pushed them to maintain the heat and the tube. The Chinese made them affordable. The GoSun designers adapted them for their stove, in a Fantastic example of exactly what Charles Jencks called “adhocism”:
Basically it involves using an available system or dealing with an existing scenario in a method to fix a problem. It’s a method of creation relying especially on resources that are available.
But the GoSun Fusion takes it a step further, pulling together all these different ideas, and is an illustration of how modern technology can converge to address the problems we face; just a decade before, the batteries and solar panels necessary to provide 150 watts for one hour could have been unaffordable.
But today they can, so instead of relying solely on solar power to cook, they all time-shift the sun with the panel and batteries. If you need somewhat more juice, or one can sip a little power.
But what I love about it’s the attitude behind it — the constant advancement, the ultra-efficiency, the scaling down of demand so that it’s simple to match supply from batteries from the sun, from anything.
The GoSun Fusion won’t save the Earth, however the design thinking behind it could.
