Message-ID: <199612170822.EAA00486@bud.peinet.pe.ca> Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 04:22:29 -0400 From: Stan Sandler <mailto:sandler@CYCOR.CA> Subject: Re: Street Foods & Solar Cooking To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
>Funny as it sounds, please distinguish intention from reality. Try
>installing a solar powered cooker in San Francisco, or London, etc.
>They are not even there... I wonder why...
I agree Reinaldo that it will be a long time before you see solar cookers in quantity in San Francisco or London. But in both these places energy is cheap and wages are high; people spend less than 1% of their income on cooking fuel; and heating and hot water are much bigger energy users than cooking. You also have a hard time finding street foods in those places :) I regret that I have never had the privledge to visit Colombia and am ignorant of conditions there, but I know that in Africa and Asia some people spend a very large proportion of their time gathering fuelwood (and it one of the most serious environmental problems).
>It is also very expensive to buy
But they can be very cheap to make. The parabolic trough I described uses one piece of aluminium type-transfer plate costing about 50 cents and some scraps of wood. Although it is extremely limited in what it will cook, it is reasonably fast and if you made it bigger it would be faster. Check out some of the other solar cookers at the Solar Cooking Archive (http://www.accessone.com/~sbcn). They are very inexpensive to make. In fact there seems to have been very little technical progress made in the design of solar cookers in recent years. Most of ideas were tried back in the fifties or sixties; some even earlier. Most of the recent efforts seem to be directed at making the very absolute cheapest cookers possible, because the people most in need of these cookers, and the people most likely to use them, have NO disposable income. Gathering wood from far away can be very time consuming, but it is free.
>and complicated to take from the home to the selling place.
Many of the cookers are made from cardboard and foil. They are not heavy, and in fact are designed to be portable. The reflectors usually fold down. Box cookers do usually have a pane of glass, but panel cookers, and the trough I described don't even have that. The small parabolic trough weighs much less than a charcoal brazier, needs no charcoal and could easily be carried by a child without even a wagon. I think most street vendors who are cooking need a lot more equipment than that.
>This is a matter of business economics alone.
I take it that you are a businessman, Reinaldo, so you probably understand the importance of marketing. If you were walking down the street, or on the beach, and you saw a skewer of meat and vegetables cooking in the open sun along the focus of a shiny trough, with the fat dripping down onto the aluminium and no heat source, might you not stop for a minute to have a closer look? And that is the first thing that the seller needs, to stop the buyer and get him interested.
Regards, Stan