Sri Lankan inventor designs coconut shell portable cooker
Due to the high cost of living with often price increases of goods and high taxes, it has been an ongoing struggle to maintain household expenses. The spiralling costs of electricity and gas are unbearable.
Cooking with coconut shell charcoal cooker
Sri Lankans are now looking for cheaper alternatives to costly electricity and fuel use.
Tenison Perera, owner of Asiri Hotel, Tudella, Ja-Ela and brother of Felix Perera, Minister of Social Services, using a simple but unique technology, has invented a cooker using coconut shells or coconut shell charcoal. He says he has already obtained patent rights for this cooking implement, and with only 3 to 4 kilos of coconut shell charcoal, meals for a family of four could be prepared for a week.
When the Business Times (BT) visited his factory near the hotel last week, Mr. Perera said that a kilo of ready- to-use-coconut shell charcoal could be bought at Rs 75 and the cost for the fuel for cooking for a family of four for one week would only be Rs 225 which is half the cost of gas (per week). He said that once the cooker sales are stabilised they could also market packeted coconut shell charcoal at a lower rate. The cooker is branded as “Free Gas Burner Machine (FGBM)”.
Asiri Hotel owner and Inventor Tenison Perera
Mr. Perera is no engineer, but he says, the grounding he has received from the Diyagala Industrial Training Centre (Diyagala Boys Town) run by Christian Brothers has ingrained into his system and moulded him to be a ‘technologist’. Thus, he says he is also involved in low cost building construction with new concreting technologies.
A tiny fan is fixed into a tank like instrument made out of metal and on top of it a small basin like container is fixed to burn the charcoal. There are three small batteries fixed underneath the container to supply electricity to oscillate a tiny fan underneath the tank.
In many instances when fuel is used and when the fuel is not fully burnt, the unburned fuel is the wastage that incurs additional cost. In this coconut charcoal cooker a simple theory is used to supply regulated oxygen through the fan to have the optimum fuel efficiency where the charcoal is fully burnt. The batteries are rechargeable and once they are recharged they could provide electricity for five hours to oscillate the fan. The electricity to recharge the batteries is minimal and would cost only a few cents.
The cooker is manufactured to a very attractive finish and a one-burner cooker would cost around Rs 4,500. Mr. Perera said that there is a range of cookers in different sizes and they could not only be used for domestic purposes, but also for industrial in hotels or large scale cooking purposes. A three-burner type cooker which could also be used to make barbecue, koththu and hopper making would cost Rs 6,500.
While this cooker uses coconut charcoal which is natural and environmentally friendly, Mr. Perera said that it is also ideal for the people who prefer food prepared in clay pots as they could go to their past and reminisce the old tasty food prepared in clay pots.
Turning out cookers
Some of these cookers are displayed in his hotel and while showing them to BT, he said that while the entire operation of the cooker is hassle free and tremendously cost effective, foreign tourists would love to have their meals cooked on these cookers because of the coconut shells. He told the BT, “Tourists come to Sri Lanka to see and experience something new, something natural and almost everything that are environmentally friendly”.
Foreigners would love when gas is replaced with coconut charcoal and Mr. Perera said it would be a great experience when these cookers are used for a barbecue with several tourists around it enjoying the barbecue. It is one unit, handy and is portable which could be taken for picnics and outdoor cooking.
He said already he has received an order for about 50 cookers from a Middle Eastern country to be used by Sri Lankans who are employed there. He said, “This order is even before the product is introduced to the market”.
He has also invented a unique tank like implement to repel mosquitoes that is just off the drawing board. Like the cooker it also uses very little electricity, Mr. Perera said. Four litres of water is poured into this tank and natural and locally effective oils that repel mosquitoes would be added into the water that turns and mixes with a tiny fan like in the cooker which gradually evaporates the contents and mosquitoes are repelled once the evaporation mixes with the air.