We sponsored a final year student project at Nottingham University to explore the ecook proposition. They have focused on reducing the energy required for cooking. Very interesting. They can reduce the heat loss from 152J/s to 52J/s. Something like 60% savings. They make the point that it is temperature that cooks food not energy per se. Keep the temperature and you ‘keep’ the cooking.
They also propose an interesting use of the system, where if its used while there is sunshine, then actually the battery size can be smaller than I had originally proposed AND still has charge left over for lights in the evening.
A jolly well done to them – some good ideas here. And my thanks to Mike Clifford, who set it up for us, and who has some really interesting ideas on phase change material. (Next year I think we will sponsor exploration of combining solar PV with phase change materials. And Mike is in the middle of an interesting research on Barriers to Improved Stoves.)
Solar Electric Cooking 
[…] kilojoule is precious saved money, then insulation is likely to become very important. Remember, the Nottingham students who explored this could save 60% of their energy by extreme insulation. It was a bit clumsy but it […]
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