Solarkitchen for 700 girls at Jamhuriat Highschool in Kabul 2010

In many developing countries energy (eg for cooking) is rare, whilst we consume it in excess. For a joint development on our planet it makes sense to share our technological, financial and material resources in an ecologically and socially agreeable way to improve the availability of energy and thereby living conditions for all people.

To ensure permanent, appropriate and non-harmful ways of energy supply it is also very important to re-think the way energy is used in the "developed" countries.

Only this way a higher quality of living can be guarantied for everybody on a peaceful and long-term bases.

Especially in dry regions it becomes more and more difficult to find wood, in rural areas women and children often have to walk for hours every day to collect enough, in the cities wood prices are rising even above the price of the food that needs to get cooked.

Using the sun can save a lot of time or money, and thinking about progressing desertification it is of direct ecological advantage.

Women at the Barefoot College in Tilonia learn to manufacture family size Scheffler Reflectors

Solare Brücke is holding practical seminars about low-tech solar technologies all over the world (mostly for constructing solar community kitchens). We are supporting our partners in developing countries with know-how, with the long-term aim of creating completely independent workshops run by local people. No financial or technological dependence must be caused.

Solar kitchen for Vatsalya childrens home, re-installed by Solare Brücke in 2013. 10m² Scheffler Reflector with automated tracking helps to cook for 60 children.www.vatsalya.org

Certainly not all projects are equally successful. This is why we find it important that our partners show enough self initiative and motivation, which becomes explicit in the amount of work and money they are willing to contribute.

For Community Kitchens at schools, hospitals, universities,... the parabolic fix focus reflectors developed by Wolfgang Scheffler have proved a success.

All sunlight hitting the 8m² mirror-surface is concentrated under a hot plate inside the house. This way every reflector delivers an average cooking power of 2,6kW, which is enough to cook for about 50 people.

Presently about 750 reflectors are in use all over the world. Like the solar box cockers the reflectors are made from locally available materials.

SK14

Designed by Dr. Ing. D. Seifert and promoted by EG - Solar ( a foreign aid initiative of the State Technical College of Altoetting ).A 1.5 m² parabolic bowl concentrates the sunlight onto the black cooking vessel supported in its centre and heats its content to boiling point. A very efficient and easy to build solar cooker.

Solar Box Coockers

designed by Uli Oehler of the ULOG -Group, are a technologically simple and easy to handle way for private people to cook without gas or wood.
The filled cooking vessels are simply placed inside the thermally insulated glazed box and exposed to the sun. Within 2 to 3 hours, the contents gets deliciously cooked without stirring or any other attention to it. The box cookers work perfectly for baking and canning, too.