August 6, 2018
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Why you should never leave a parabolic mirror in your car
A teacher with a knack for constructing solar ovens has discovered the hard way why you should never leave a parabolic mirror in your car on a sunny day.
Marc ‘Zeke’ Kossover, who works at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, shared images of the decimated interior of his Subaru Outback after the reflective material melted the molding. While the damage looks severe, Kossover was quick to point out that it could have been far worse, noting he was lucky the car didn’t catch on fire.
Kossover shared his experience in a recent blog post, answering a question that many were likely wondering: how did this even happen?
According to the teacher, he’d constructed an impressive solar oven a few years back, using a meter-wide Direct TV dish and highly reflective Mylar. Fast forward to this summer, when Kossover says he decided to ‘bring it to work for grins.’
The homemade solar oven gets so hot it can pasteurize a liter of water in 15 minutes, according to Kossover. But, instead of showing it off to his colleagues, he forgot it in the back of his car on a sunny day.
Kossover explained: ‘I had a lot to carry into the Exploratorium, and the mirror wouldn’t fit on the cart. I planned on coming back in a few minutes, but I got busy doing something else, and it slipped my mind. Coming back in the afternoon, I sat in the driver seat and looked into the rear view mirror. Uh oh.’
Images shared alongside the story show a scene that would be any car-owner’s nightmare. Plastic molding along long the back window of Kossover’s car melted in ‘a fairly impressive way,’ creating long strips of unsightly dangling plastic.
Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk
