After our success cooking mashed potatoes, we were eager to cook some rice. In the initial thirty minutes, we noticed that our temperatures were fairly stagnant and wondered whether i it could be due to the fact that we had not soldered the wires connected to our pot. We decided to use wire strippers to expose a fresh section of wire, and after doing so the temperature began to rise quickly. We were able to cook delicious rice in about 1.5 hours. To avoid this step, we plan to solder the wires and plan to look into permanent or semi--permanent plugs to increase efficiency.
During our testing, the locations we used had quite a lot of shade. This required semi-frequent adjusting of the solar panel to obtain the most amount of shade. This does not seem to pose and issue in Malawi, however, so this inconvenience is relatively unimportant.
This test was a great success, with another small
problem being that we added too much water for the amount of rice we cooked.
In the end, the rice did taste fantastic, just a little more moist than usual. We found the temperature differences between the nesting pot and the cooking pot to be around 5 degrees Celsius.
