Solar cooking is identified as one of the most viable and sustainable cooking alternatives which offers key advantages including food nutrition retention, low cost, and environment-friendly operations.
The solar cooker could be useful to residential schools, institutional kitchens such as industrial and administrative canteens, religious ashrams, hotels, hospitals, police, and armed forces kitchens, etc. Solar cookers can save around 35 to 40 LPG cylinders/ year on full use in community kitchens.
Solar cookers have been designed to cater to specific cooking methods (boiling, frying, roasting, baking) and can be broadly classified into four types.
- Solar Box Cookers (~100 °C)
- Concentrating Solar Cookers (>100 °C) (e.g., Parabolic dish)
- Advanced Round-the-Clock (RTC) with heat storage/Indoor Solar Cookers (>100 °C)
- Community Solar Cookers (superheated steam-based) Community-based solar cookers are popular in temples around India (e.g., the Shirdi Sai Temple in Maharashtra). Surya Nutan and PV-based induction cooking are recently launched solar cookers.
Standards – Box Type Solar Cookers
- IS 13429: Part 1 (2020) – Solar Cooker — Box Type — Specification Part 1 Requirements (Second Revision)
- IS 13429: Part (2018) – Solar Cooker — Box Type — Specification Part 2 Components (Second Revision)
- IS 13429: Part 3 (2018) – Solar Cooker — Box Type — Specification Part 3 Test Method (Second Revision)
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