The Kyoto box just won a prize worth $75000 for the most innovative solution to reduce green house gas emissions.
It is a solar powered cooker that can cook rice, boil water and so on and it costs only $6 or less to make.
It uses 2 cardboard boxes – one inside the other. The insides of the inner box are painted black to absorb solar radiation better. The space between the two boxes is filled with shredded paper / saw dust or similar insulating agent.
The lapels (for lack of a better word) of the outer box are covered with silver foil and the inner box is covered with a transperant acrylic lid which keeps the insides warm and manages to raise the temperature within this cooking box to upto 80 deg.
Thank you Jon Bohmer for this innovative device that is affordable and hence more likely to replace firewood for cooking.
In truly Rehmanesque fashion – Jai Ho!
Those of us who have worked for years to promote awareness of solar cooking are thrilled at the prize won by Jon Bohmer for his solar cooker. The publicity it has generated will help raise the profile of this simple, powerful and renewable technology.
It is however, not a ‘new invention’.
The cardboard solar box cooker, for which Mr. Bohmer won $75,000 from the FT Climate Change Challenge is a variation on one of the many designs that have been freely available to the public for years on Solar Cookers International’s archive.
The archive website contains extensive data on the design, construction, dissemination and international use of solar cookers to reduce carbon emissions and deforestation.
After logging on to the SCI web archive, users can click on build a solar cooker. There they will find detailed plans for a variety of cardboard, wood, metal and plastic solar box cookers, solar panel cookers and solar parabolic cookers.
Solar cooker advocates like Mr. Bohmer who have been inspired by the many designs currently available often come up with new variations and post them to our website where they can be shared with the rest of the world.
The solar box cooker is the oldest type of solar cooker. It was first widely promoted by two American women who were among the founders of SCI in 1988. Our organization was initially know as Solar Box Cookers International. Another of SCI’s founders, Robert Metcalf has been traveling the world for decades teaching people how to build and use solar cookers not only for cooking but also for solar water pasteurization.
When refugee populations in Africa began expanding in the early 1990s and access to cooking fuel and clean water became a serious problem for these people, a more portable version of the cardboard box solar cooker was developed by Roger Bernard.
Almost all solar cooker projects are currently funded by small non-profits. There is little to no government funding available. And yet many governments continue to subsidize the purchase of bottled cooking gas by up to 50% and the charcoal trade is destroying the forests of Africa and south Asia. This must change.
The largest solar cooker project currently underway is in three Darfur refugee camps in Chad. The women in those camps have manufactured and distributed more than 30,000 cardboard and aluminum foil Cookits. Trips outside the camp to gather firewood have been reduced by 86%.
Pat,
Thank you for your comments and pointing me to the Solar cooker archive.
People reading this post – the link to the archive of solar cooker designs is here – http://solarcooking.org/plans/default.htm. Please take a look at some of the other designs for solar cookers that people have come up with.
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Is that hot enough to cook with?
With additional reflectors you could increase the solar heat input, but then you may have to devise some controld device to prevent over-heating. I saw a graphic demonstration of a piece of meat being literally vapourised by concentrated sunlight.
That would be very well done indeed!
But you are right – without any temperature control food could be raw, undercooked, well done or burnt but then how do you provide a inexpensive control mechanism?
After all the biggest draw of the kyoto box was its cost to produce. If the protoype takes less than $6 then it would cost far less when mass produced.
Has there been any work around producing inexpensive temperature control for solar food heating equipment?
As long as key factors were of more or less fixed value, for example, the time of day that the cooker was to be used, (hence the strength of sunlight) and the total area of reflector with some trial and error, you would find out what worked and what didn’t. Then if you remember / record the prevailing conditions, you could operate the cooker successfully. Control would be by using the appropriate area of reflector for the item being cooked. No costs involved, just knowledge.
Green Engg! thank you. So in other words control would be an experential factor a lot like how we cook on a gas flame … we are just required to track different factors …