Tag Archives: solar devices

Kyoto Box: solar cooker can boil 10 liters of water in 2 hours

The Kyoto Box, a solar cooker which retails for €15 (about $20 USD) can boil 10 liters (2.64 gallons) of water in 2 hours.

So apart from its primary uses – cooking and water purification – it can probably be pressed into service to sterilize medical instruments.

The manufacturer, Kyoto-Energy, has offices in Indonesia, South Africa, and headquarters in Kenya, which suggests local production.

According to the WHO, 1.6 million people die worldwide annually from gases produced by indoor cooking.  ((More than half of the world’s population rely on dung, wood, crop waste or coal to meet their most basic energy needs. Cooking and heating with such solid fuels on open fires or stoves without chimneys leads to indoor air pollution. This indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants including small soot or dust particles that are able to penetrate deep into the lungs. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can exceed acceptable levels for small particles in outdoor air 100-fold. Exposure is particularly high among women and children, who spend the most time near the domestic hearth. Every year, indoor air pollution is responsible for the death of 1.6 million people – that’s one death every 20 seconds.  Source: WHO Fact Sheet, “Indoor Air Pollution and Health, ” dated June 2005. ))

The Kyoto Box, then, has a number of virtues:

  • no scale requirements; because they’re entirely autonomous, one or one million in use will have an effect;
  • reduction of indoor air pollution deaths; and used in scale, a reduction in outdoor

    air pollution as well;

  • reduction of water-borne diseases via water purification, and food-borne diseases via cooking;
  • lowering of energy costs;
  • where wood is used for fuel, a reduction of deforestation, with the long-term effects of mitigating flood risk and increasing the availability of lumber and tree shade


Solar flashlights on sale at Sierra Trading Post

Sierra Trading Post has solar-powered LED flashlights on sale for $7.96.I believe this is identical to a flashlight I’ve been testing and using and it’s pretty impressive – if kept on a windowsill – or exposed to artificial interior light – all day, it runs for at least a couple of hours.

And it’s got a clever design feature, which reduces the risk of accidentally turning on the light: the button needs to be depressed twiceto be turned on. That is, the switch is set to OFF, OFF, ON. If you didn’t know this, you’d likely find that it worked on your second try to turn it on.

solar flashlight from Sierra Trading Post.

solar flashlight from Sierra Trading Post.

Link to product page. We can think of two ways this light might be improved – (1) by adding photoluminescent (“glow in the dark”) material to the exterior, (2) adding reflective material, ideally Reflexite, to the exterior. A combination of both – and a bright color – would make it easily findable in the dark – when you’re likely to want it.

I’ve been keeping mine on the windowsill; be advised that these are seconds – because of minor cosmetic blemishes.

This seems a useful household emergency tool; possibly a good addition to a go-bag – but one wouldn’t want to store it in a go-bag, because of the charge. And it’s too big for a purse/keychain flashlight. However, they might be ideally placed one to a windowsill – or across from mirrors which get a steady exposure to light, or under a skylight.