Abstract
In India, due to the high price of cooking gases, people still cook with noncommercial fuels like kerosene and firewood. These cause a lot of health problems and also harm the environment. A clean solution to this problem is to use a solar cooker. A solar cooker suffers from the problem of low utility and hence takes a longer period of time for cooking. To counter this problem and reduce cooking time, the solar cooker is tested with charcoal coated utensil. In this paper, a parabolic-type domestic solar cooker is tested for the same utensil with and without cost effective thermal coating. It is observed that the effectiveness and efficiency of cooking is considerably increased by using the charcoal coating on the utensil. Considering the economic condition of the people of the selected area, this method provides a cost effective way to increase the cooking effectiveness of the solar cooker and reduce dependency on noncommercial fuels.