Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

A New Stored Heat (Haybox) Cooker

You can find the instructions for how I made my original stored heat cooker here. It worked well, was cheap and easy to build, but had some shortcomings, I never did get around to building a nice wooden box for it to go into so it looks just like what it is, a crappy old esky, even after Linda gave it a coat of silver spray paint to tart it up for sustainable house day. Due to its crappy appearance it rarely made it into the house so it didn’t get used as much as it should have and these things are great for saving energy. I just had to come up with something better!

To make things better I needed to do a couple of things differently –

  1. Build the thing into a nice looking piece of furniture that didn’t look out of place inside the house and could be located near enough to the cooking area to make it readily useable.
  2. Instead of using a billy or two as the cooking vessel, build it around cooking pots that we regularly use anyway making it easier to work out the recipes etc.

The new haybox cooker c/w cat!

For the last 15 years or so I have annoyed the living daylights out of Linda by exclaiming how a particular box or piece of furniture would make a great haybox cooker. So after some serious looking I found a comparatively cheap blanket box with a padded top that you could sit on, it was covered with a dark vinyl material and fitted our “decor” reasonably well, so I got it.

A long shot showing both pots

Converting it to a stored heat cooker was easy, I used the sheets of waste polystyrene foam that I had gotten hold of while working for the concrete precaster and cut them to size using a more sophisticated hot wire polystyrene cutter. We got hold of the cutter from a craft/model supply place in Gosford and rather than having a thin wire strung between contacts it had a stronger electrically heated wire attached to a handle that you can just push into the polystyrene and start cutting.

electric polystyrene cutter

I cut a couple of sheets and put them into the box as insulation for the bottom of the pots and then cut three more sheets to act as insulation around the pots. The box is long and narrow so it took two pots easily; I selected a stainless steel 3 litre pot and a Pyrex casserole of about 4 litres capacity, then placed them on a polystyrene sheet, traced around the bottom and then using the cutter, cut out a disk, leaving a hole the same size as the pot. I test fitted the pot into the hole and had to make a couple of minor cuts but the stainless steel pot fitted well. The Pyrex pot tapered from the bottom outwards to the top so it was a bit trickier but in the end I was able to get a reasonable fit.

One pot fitted and one pillowcase in place

To ensure that the holes were in the right place, I put the cut sheet on top of an uncut one and using a pencil, drew around the inside of the hole, transferring the outline to the uncut blank. I then pressed the hot wire cutter into service and cut around the pencil line, placed the two sheets on atop the other and test fitted the pots again. I followed this process a third time, making sure the pots fitted the entire profile of the hole, and then fitted the cut sheets into the box.

Using the jam funnel to fill a (red) pillowcase with beans

Showing the underside

While most of the pots were now covered by the polystyrene foam sheets, the tops were still exposed so I got hold of a couple of pillow cases and filled them with polystyrene bean-bag beans and then Linda sewed them up.  During that operation it is REALLY easy to spray beans all over the place and the staticy little things get into the strangest places. We found the best way to do it was to sew up the open end except for about 10cm or so, then put a wide mouthed jam funnel  into the opening and sticky tape it in place and pour the beans in through there. That method resulted in the least amount of beans lost.

a pillowcase, slightly over stuffed!

In the event we got carried away and put too many beads in, there needs to be enough so that the tops are covered by at least 50mm of beans but not so much that the pillow case is too hard to conform to the top of the pots. We had to take out about a third of the beans that we had originally to get the fit right.

The new cooker is getting quite a bit of use and both containers have been used to make a number of meals, and it has been working so well that we talked about it with our eldest daughter and she thought it sounded great. We picked up an ottoman that was hollow inside and had a removable top and she and I made it into a stored heat cooker together. She has made several batches of “ottoman soup” and has found that it works really well.

The ottoman, ready to make ottoman soup!

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