Shobha Pardeshi With Her Do-It-Yourself Parvati Solar Cooker Made With $5 of Parts
In the old days, when we developed our nation's first natural gas pipelines, the phrase “now, we’re cooking with gas!” became a phrase connoting stepping up into the future and modern times. Now, it’s the opposite, as a wide array of do-it-yourself solar cooking stoves are available with free designs and instructions online. Now if you want to be modern and futuristic, you have to say, "Now we're cooking with solar."
Kosowatt Sweeper provided this link to me to Shobha Pardeshi, from India who has assembled dozens of designs and easy to follow instructions for building your own solar ovens. Some models are portable, and all design instructions free, and many models can be built with less than $5 in parts.
Check out her wide selection of different models which you can read about in many languages.
Shobha Pardeshi's Pavarti Solar Cooker
Shobha is leading an honest to goodness, grassroots empowerment movement in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi's and David Thoreau's philosophies of self-reliance. You can only be free if you have the power to meet your own needs, with materials, and effort you can create and control for yourself. To the extent you can not meet your basic needs without dependency on mega-corporate entities who do not care for your existence, you are a slave, just as much as the black slaves of the old south.
The only difference is that for the convenience of your corporate masters, you carry your chains in your own minds, rather than in cold steel schackles around your ankles.
Which in some ways is worse. As we too easily develop false consciousness where we adopt the ideaology, opinions, and choices that are not in our best interest, but rather represent the interests of the plutocrachy and very rich. The slaves of the old south, did not seem to become as confused about the oppressive nature of their enslavement.
Just as Mahatma Gandhi encouraged his followers to weave their own clothes with a spinning wheel, to free themselves from British economic domination, Shobha Parvati, aims to free the common people of the third world from the shackles of megacorporate conglomarations that have proven they have no concern for the poorest half of the almost 7 billion people on earth today.
Those who find themselves voluntarily shackled to the vastly expensive, dependency of the modern industrial systems, where we can find ourselves enslaved to minimum annual budgets that require $100,000/year plus incomes, just to scrap by year to year, and all the attendent sacrifaces that come with the "strings attached," may find themselves to be envious of the third world "impoverished" half of the world populations who are finding ways to meet their needs, and achieve freedom, for mere dollars per year.
Tonight, I am focusing, Shobha Pavorti's do-it-yourself solar cookers, but, if you check out her rambling, but rich and generous websites, you will soon discover she, and her husband, also describe do-it-yourself plans for a moter assisted bicycles and many other ways to meet the needs of of the poorest half of the worlds population. But, be forewarned she appears to have as many homepages, as her several dozen different designs for home solar cookers.
In Shobha's words:
I became interested in energy saving and low cost technologies.
My husband and myself decided to work in this field. For this purpose I have decided to work from my Home with a small setup called "RP Appropriate Technologies". My Husband Mr. Ravindra Pardeshi is a Science Graduate and very enthusiastic. We have two sons Mr. Uday and Mr. Milind. We have decided to work on different projects and going to put various information on this website.
1. Low cost Solar Cooker
2. Electrical and Pedal/Electric assisted bicycles and small Vehicles.
First of our project is " Low Cost Solar Cooker " We have designed one and using it . We have Named it as 'Parvati Solar cooker'.
We have studied in this process on how to place multiple cooking pots. The results and photos are placed at Positioning of Cooking pots. Parvati Solar cooker and Full size plans available.
First of our project is " Low Cost Solar Cooker ". For this we selected Funnel Cooker by Dr. Steven E. Jones While our experiments were being carried out we had found out that stacking of pots works better than placing them them side by side in funnel cooker. See these results here. Hence we considered the total size of stacked cooking pots as 6 inches dia. And 6 inches height.
We decided to improve this design. From the drawing we decided on a meeting point of Sunlight that are reflected from the rim of the cone. ( Point 'x' in figure1). The second cone of 900 was started from this level( The reference for this was taken from Prof. Mann's (1981) improvement to VITA design ). The length of 900 cone section was taken as 6.25 inches. The base was closed and made reflective, so that any sunlight passing from sides of cooking pot is reflected back.
How to make and use Parvati Solar Cooker
As explained earlier Parvati Solar Cooker is Modified Funnel Cooker. This is made out of three sections. The reflector part is made out of cardboard. Stainless steel sheet also can be used as it is more durable We have constructed two types a) Circular type b) Twelve sided type Construction of circular type is given here and twelve sided version is given at Next page.
Design of Parvati Solar cooker: (Circular type)
Circular Parvati Solar cooker is made of three sections. Part C forms the upper section. Part B forms the lower section and part A forms the base of the cooker. How to cut these three parts from a single sheet of cardboard or aluminum or stainless steel sheet is shown in Fig 4 . Detailed dimensions for 24 inch diameter cooker are shown in Fig 5. This collector can collects heat energy equivalent to about 300 watts. For higher energy diameter of 30 , 36, 48 or higher can be used. For these sized collectors multiply the given dimensions by 1.25, 1.5 or 2 respectively.
Part C is semicircle shaped. Outer radius is 24 inches and inner radius is 16 inches. Join two end of this semicircle to form the upper section of cone.
Part B has outer radius of 12 inches, next circle is of radius 11.3 inches and third circle of radius 4.8 inches. Part B is 255 degrees section of circle. Join two end of this section to form the middle section of cone. Part B has collar space to join it to Part C.
Part A is base of the structure. It is made of circle of radius 4..0 inches. There is another circle seen inside with same center. It's radius is 3.6 inches. This collar space is for joining the base to part B. The construction is shown Fig 6
Please go Shobha Pavarti wesbite just to click up her site vists counter which now stands at just over 25,000 on one of her serveral dozen home pages.
She is a global progressive doing excellent and admirable work for the world's poor that we should proud and happy to support in every way we can. This woman and her husband appear to be making tremendous contributions to the world's poorest people, with little thought of her own remuneration.
Although Shobha Pardeshi publishes complete plans for free on her website, those wishing to support this generous, Indian entrepreneur can mail her at:
Mrs. Shobha Ravindra Pardeshi, D-13 Aranyeshwar Park, Sahakar Nagar, Parvati, Pune India Pin 411 009.
Parvati Solar cooker and Full size plans available.
One of Shobha Home Pages
Another Shobha Pardeshi Home Page
So next time those “high-brow” mega-corporate snobs try to impress you by saying they now they are “cooking with gas,” you can say, “been there done that, all the cool folks are now cooking with solar."
Hypnotoad Says "You will click on, and look at Shobha Pardeshi's Website In Solidarity with and moral support for, the World's Poorest 3.5 Billion People.
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