Traditional
cooking stoves have a low thermal efficiency of around 15%. From the early
days the Council has been striving to provide Karnataka's house wife with
a low cost alternative stove which would cook at higher efficiencies and
would not demand drastic changes in cooking practices. Efforts in this direction
resulted in Astra Ole, a three pan smokeless stove which can be constructed
using locally available materials. Its efficiency is around 40% and nearly
2 lakh such stoves are now in use in Karnataka.
From extensive field and regular feed back it was noticed that this stove
had two inherent features :
| 1. |
It is not portable, is constructed in situ;
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| 2. |
All
the three pans had to be used to achieve the high efficiency claimed.
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