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The Solar Cooker team designs, builds, and tests solar cookers, solar dryers, water distillers and pasteurizers and other solar powered systems. Our mission is to improve and optimize alternative energy solutions to cooking and other household needs in cooperation with Grupo Fenix, an organization at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeneria in Managua, Nicaragua, and Las Mujeres Solares de Totogalpa, a women's collective in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua. Grupo Fenix works in Nicaragua to develop, implement and publicize renewable, sustainable solutions to energy needs. Las Mujeres Solares de Totogalpa has worked with Grupo Fenix building and using solar cookers, dryers, water distillers, biogas generators, charcoal production and charcoal stoves. They have a Solar Restaurant, in which the food is prepared with solar cookers and other alternative energy cooking methods, including use of electricity from photovoltaic solar arrays and gas from bio-digested manure. Sabana Grande is in a region suffering from deforestation and concomitant erosion of topsoil and the loss of water retention. The use of Solar Ovens reduces the need for women to spend hours of their day gathering wood for cooking fuel and helps reduce the health risks from fires used for cooking and the smoke from open fires in the cooking areas, frequently within the house. The Solar Cooker Team works to evolve the cooker design in use in Nicaragua and increase the use of Solar Ovens. New designs are careful to use materials and technologies available to our cooperators in Nicaragua. The team visited Las Mujeres... and Grupo Fenix this spring in Sabana Grande during spring break. Eight members of the team had a successful visit with the Solar Women, building 1 new (more portable) cooker, two water distillers and a bicycle powered electricity generator. Here is a short teaser for a video about Las Mujeres that resulted from our Spring 2012 trip. Click the link for more information on our 2013 Nicaragua Trip. .
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