The AMSI-Cooker is one of the many grandchildren od Dr. Dieter Seifert, who is called the father of parabolic solar cooking.  He invented this type of cooker of parabolic shape with a deep focus within about half the mirror depth in 1980 and inspired many people to copy and adopt this design to fit best to the local needs.  An other new concept was to use material of high quality and precision to make the cooker long lasting, pecise and durable.

Meanwhile after about 16.000 cookers of exactly his proposed mirror shape and material (bendable mirrorsheets made from aluminium) have been produced and distributed world wide there is no need to say that this is a very reasonable and good cooker.

Here is a gallery of links to parabolic solar cookers which may proudly be called Dr. Seiferts gandchildren:

• The cooker of "Sun and Ice" a successor of EG-Solar where you may as well buy the mirror-sheets
• TheCocina alSol 1.4 of cocinadomesticos (Spain)
• The KSOL from Spain
• Cooker from Masters Engineers or Radha Energy Cell or the Rudra SK-14 (India)
• The sunfire 14 from South Africa

The AMSI-cooker came to life more than 15 years after Dr. Seiferts invention, when I went 1996 with my family for two years to Arba Minch in the very south of Ethiopia to be employed there at the former "Arba Minch Water Technology institute" as lecturer for geotechnics as a CIM technical expert.  I took one of Dr. Seiferts cooker with me which I bought from EG-Solar to use it there for my own needs in case of the frequent powercuts on the campus.  After learning more abaout the real needs of the country in the first year I couln'd help to try to do something more urgend and useful for the country I learned to love than teaching rock mechanics and tunneling to students who most probably will never build the very first tunnel in Ethiopia. So out of some kind of frustration of what I'm supposed to do, and insight of what can be done to meet the realy "burning problem" oof firewood consumption in Ethiopia, I decided to start a little private support program in my free time on the basis on the experiences I got by using the solar cooker of EG-Solar.

I spend a lot of evenings, weekends and private money to adopt the "high-tech-concept" of Dr. Seiferts cooker to the local demands, resources and skills, which results finally in the little AMSI-project.

Back to my former life as employee at the University of Stuttgart in Germany I was very sad to see the little project dying out within only one year time. I had to realise that the spare time of only one year was by far not enough to let the spark of enthusiasm grow to a sustainable litte fire.  To set up this website was an other try to support people in ethiopia who may continue or start something similar anew.

In the year 2002 I made an other attempt to renew and support the little spark of a promising concept by using a two weeks leave to promote the idea of solar-cooking in Ethiopia together with Mr. Achermann from Swizerland.  And although there was a lot of promising interest and support even on government level, probably the best I could do was to provide Mr. Bereket Dessie (who invited us to sty in his house) with a roll-bending equipment and a demonstration on who to build the AMSI-cooker by the use  of welding on the wood-model.
(here you can find his workshop)

Probably I may continue my ambitions in promoting solar cooking after beeing retired ... it is still very fascinating to me.