Tips to Save with Pressure Cookers
Save 2 Trees a Year: Switch to a Pressure Cooker for Chulha
Use of Pressure Cookers is beneficial to conserve trees and reduce deforestation as explained below:
- A household using firewood for cooking (generally on a chulha) consumes about 2.5 kg of wood per day, as per some estimates*.
- An average tree should weigh between 200 and 250 kg.
- A rural household would cook about 700 times a year (assuming average at least two times of cooking a day, and on average cooking at home for 350 days a year).
- We have seen that pressure cooking saves about 52% of fuel as compared to cooking in an open pot when using the same source of heat, LPG (see here). If the pressure cookers demonstrates similar efficiency in fuel saving on firewood, then each household that adopts pressure cooking in place of open pot cooking will save, on a conservative basis, half of its average wood fuel consumption. This will work out to about 1.25 kg per day. Over the year, assuming 350 cooking days, this is a fuel saving equivalent to around 440 kg of firewood.
- This translates to a saving that is the equivalent of the assumed average weight of about two trees per annum.
* Singh, Kumar, Sridhar and Dwivedi, “Valuation of fuelwood from agroforestry systems: a methodological Perspective” which estimates the quantity of fuelwood consumed per capita using data from the 68th (2011–12) round of the ‘Energy Sources of Indian Households’ and ‘Household Consumption of Various Goods and Services in India’, National Sample Survey Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India.