Your kitchen waste can help you cook for the rest of your life using this start-up's biogas stove. Here's how

Cooking a lot during the lockdown? Going through your LPG cylinders as if they only have air in them? This start-up, Shaktisteller Energy Solutions, has the perfect fix for you — they can use your biogas to run your stove for free. Ankit Roy and Praveen Modi, the founders of Shaktisteller, say that their biogas plant is a one-time investment and is nothing but self-sufficient and sustainable.  

The tech this Bhopal-based firm is using is very simple and needs no manual intervention. "The mechanism uses your kitchen waste and anything organic to produce methane, which then is used for combustion. Once you pour the kitchen waste into the digestion tanks. A mixer crushes all the waste to make the decomposition process faster. Each kilogram of waste produces one hour's fuel," Ankit explains. "The gas rises and through a dome attached on top is transferred to the stove," he added.

Praveen and Ankit met at the Indian Coffee House and they hit it off instantly. Shaktisteller was started in 2017. "I wanted to find a sustainable solution to our energy problems and Praveen loved the idea and also wanted to finance us. We started Shaktisteller with solar solutions and moved into electric and biogas later. Solar still is one of our major products," said Ankit, an engineer from National Institute of Technology (Bhopal), who worked in Mumbai for sometime before moving back to Bhopal in 2016.

The stove too, is different from the regular stove that you get. "Since methane is a heavier gas than LPG, the pores need to be wider for better combustion," said Praveen. "The first decomposition takes a little time — 10 to 15 days. But after that it is produced on a daily basis. You put anything that is leftover, vegetable peels etc in the tank and it will produce gas for the next day," he added.

They have tanks starting from 3 litres to 20 litres with a price range of Rs 42,000 to Rs 1.9 lakh. While the smaller ones are meant for domestic use, the larger tanks have already been installed in a few hostels and the RPM Motorsports in Bhopal. But the biogas idea came while working at the Mahar Regiment Centre, Sagar. The authorities there gave them a month to work on a sustainable method to use their kitcehwaste to generate the gas. "We took 30 to 35 odd days and finalised on the design and now we have installed the setup in a few other hostels and a domestic setup," said Ankit.