Community Solar Cooker; the Gujarat Model

COMMUNITY SOLAR COOKER (With Automatic Solar Tracking System)

You must definitely be familiar with the standard box-type 'Surya' Cooker. Numerous households all over the country are using it to cook their meals. This family-sized cooker can cook meals for 4-5 persons. A larger version of the family size box-type cooker was also developed and used for canteen application. The canteen size solar cookers are just larger in size and can cook for 10-15 persons. What if you wish to cook for 50 - 100 people? A large Community Solar Cooker has been developed with Solar Concentrator technology. It is an ideal cooking device for hostels, ashramshalla, etc.

This Concentrator Type Solar Cooker has been designed & developed by Mr. Wolfgang Scheffler, a German Engineer.

Firewood is the most commonly used cooking fuel in community kitchens and traditional woodstove - a 'chulha' are the most commonly used cooking device. These chulhas have an efficiency of 5-10 % only. The implications of utilizing such inefficient devices are higher fuel consumption & environment pollution. As a result more trees are felled each year for meeting the ever-increasing energy demands. This leads to rapid deforestation and environment degradation. In addition, the smoke from chulhas causes serious health hazard to kitchen workers. The Community Solar Cooker, in contrast, poses no such health hazards as it utilizes the freely available eco-friendly solar energy from nature.

This Community Solar Cooker employs a parabolic reflecting concentrator that can cook large quantities of food at much faster rate. The best part is that the cooking can take place within an enclosed kitchen just as by any other alternative methods? Unbelievable? But True! This Cooker with its design can be extremely useful and convenient for dharmshalas, ashram shalas, hostels or any type of community kitchens. It can replace LPG, kerosene and firewood which are either cumbersome to use, very expensive or which are in short supply.

This Cooker is technologically far superior to the box-type community cooker, having overcome a number of shortcomings of the box type cooker. This cooker is capable of achieving higher temperature upto 250 degree C as against 100-125 deg.C in box type cooker. This helps cooking much faster. The conventional cooking arrangement within the kitchen does not require to be changed and the cooking can be done inside the kitchen. Additionally roasting & frying can be done with this cooker which is not possible in the old box type solar cooker.