What’s in your hands? Low-Tech, Mid-Tech or High-Tech?

We want to mitigate climate change, and transform and rebuild societies based on more social justice. All the tech we use should be adapted to the context of their usage, and people’s tools need to be in people’s hands. What we need is long lasting sustainable technologies supporting human activities with no or very limited pollution, isn’t it?

We are explaining here the path we took to address this challenge with the Lytefire tech.

Lytefire is designed to generate heat directly from the sun

Energy is not only electricity. A vast amount of people and processes only require heat. The sun is the infinite energy source, and most interestingly a non-proprietary one. The Earth is literally floating in a bath of sun rays. Capture some of it and you have energy, in the form of electricity (with photovoltaics) or concentrated heat (with Lytefire and CSP).

When Mr Fraser Symington came up with the very first versions of what is today called Lytefire, it was to help all the people who make fire with tires, waste and biomass. There were solar cookers at that time already but not powerful enough to do more than cooking a lunch meal or a few nice breads a day. Fraser gave himself 3 major constraints for this tech. It would have to be: 1) as powerful as an open fire (it would later be called a “solar fire”), 2) built with materials available locally as much as possible, 3) easy to use and maintain by the users.

So when the first team gathered together, the goal was to spread such a tech and empower people. That’s simple to say, and much harder to do, mostly because of human resistance to change that can take so many forms. So we added a fourth constraints: users would have to be able to use this “solar fire” to make money because something that makes money can overcome many layers of resistance to change, right?

Like for anyone willing to make a change, each step comes with lots of questions. Since the beginning, our group wanted to explore the open source aspect of our work, meaning put everything available for free on the Internet, like it has been the case with the solar cooking movement. But after lots of creative brainstorming we found our way to be a patented tech on one side, and also sell DIY construction manuals for the simpler fabrication method on the other side. The reason is that we want to use the strengths of entrepreneurship to spread Lytefire as much as possible to those who need it most, which is not possible only with DIY’ers’ good-will in the context of absolute climate emergency. So we have developped a very unique model in the energy field (see our post about open source).

Dialogue and Simplicity: A Middle Way for a Mid Tech

To implement change, active cooperation with different stakeholders is key. Around Lytefire, we can see more and more different users and stakeholders interacting: coming from the humanitarian sector, policy makers, retailers, industry, artisans and DIYers. With all of them we are happy to engage to go further with innovation when needed and "disnovation" (or simplicity) when needed, to adapt, adjust, simplify or upgrade Lytefire for its users.

The Low-tech idea is that a product should be simple to make, simple to use, and simple to maintain, which is another way to refer to the local artisan pre-industrial age way of producing. The idea is to give the user the greatest control over the product. Examples are laptops that can be assembled by the user and all parts replaced and reconfigured, sustainable ram-pumps for irrigation of permaculture gardens, IoT solutions that are open source and put the user and privacy first, farm tools that can be built by the farmers themselves, etc. Low-tech may involve high-tech components, but the overall solution should still be buildable and maintainable by the users.

So, are we strictly Low-tech? Not all the time. Are we High-tech? In some aspects, as we’ll see later in this text, yes. As a result, we are a Mid-Tech, which means an “adaptive equipment requiring a medium level of technology, including equipment that falls between the low tech and high tech categories or that utilizes features of both categories.” What matters to us is to provide users the highest performance, utility and maintainability.

With this we are able to innovate with many different kinds of partnerships that are mutually beneficial. And the beauty of Lytefire Tech as you see it today is that it is the result of years of development by passionate people on the ground and by engineers for different users operating in different contexts.

At Lytefire we believe strongly that Innovation is here to serve the users

Planned obsolescence is on the rise, as we see this in the manufacturing industry more and more. The concept seems to be, rather than making maintainable products with happy clients that can maintain their product over a long period of time (and bring in more customers based on their satisfaction), companies prefer to sell breaking, non-maintainable products (that people are forced to buy for lack of options). This approach comes from a growth mindset in oversatisfied industries: Once you can’t grow your customer base, you need to increase the number of sales per customer, and shortening product life cycle is one option. Luckily, this is not the only modus operandi. Plenty of companies have adopted the circular economy this last decade, and more and more this maintainability and circularity are becoming a sales criteria (again).

Further, with Lytefire we are on an impact mission, and given the fossil-fuel reality and the broad applicability of Lytefire long-term (beyond ovens, roasters, and stoves), we are lucky to be in an industry where innovation can serve a growing renewable and sustainable market.

An honest focus on user centric innovation can take the shape of low-tech innovation: Innovation that simplifies a product, rather than complexifies it. With Lytefire we have done this over and over to reach a solution that can actually be maintained in remote areas and still bring the power to run real, small local businesses, such as roasteries and bakeries that are completely off-grid.

Examples of Lytefire’s low-tech focus are the use of locally available mirror material. No matter if you are in a Kenyan town or downtown Paris: The materials to maintain Lytefire are most of the time available locally. This is by design, as we have invested in developing methods to use the cheapest most readily available reflectors with Lytefire: Glass mirror. However, this does not limit us to the use of these mirrors, other reflectors that may be lighter or higher-durability are possible to use too, but we haven’t found them to beat the cost-effectiveness of readily available glass mirrors in vulnerable economies (so far). And even if we should ship with ultra-thin, lightweight mirrors in the future, we will maintain that fundamental ability to replace mirrors and parts easily. Because a product must empower users first and foremost. Besides, if we would innovate to create a proprietary mirror system that needs to be shipped from our homebase in Finland each time – we might as well not do any work in remote areas internationally.

We have also optimized the production of Lytefire to reach efficiencies of parabolic mirrors, but with no of the same complex geometries: Lytefire licensees are able to manufacture Lytefire with simple straight parts and quality control is simple as we do not use complex parabolic shapes. This is part of the fundamental Lytefire innovation that brings high focal point temperature without need to create parabolic or fresnel type reflections. It puts us into our own category, but we are fine with that. ;) The fact that Lytefire can be produced easily also helps licensees get started with lower investments.

Fabrication and innovation around and with Lytefire can be both high-tech and low-tech

Most importantly, we believe Lytefire’s approach may do to energy what the printing press and the internet did to information: Making it much more available than before. We may go as far as to say that Lytefire is here to democratize access to solar energy. At least this was the motivation of our founding team. “I remember myself, before joining team Lytefire, installing solar photovoltaic panels in rural Nepal back in 2012. I thought to myself, if these break, even with engineering knowledge on-site, there’s nothing one can do. We would need to import another PV panel to replace it, and that is costly and difficult in a rural area. (Ironically, the producer of the panel was BP Solar, then owned (and since exited) by British Petroleum, who silently changed their slogan away from “Beyond Petroleum” around that time and introduced the world to the carbon footprint, in a conscious attempt to shift the blame away from Big Oil to the consumers.” – says Urs Riggenbach, CEO at Lytefire.

PV panels are inherently high-tech: Photovoltaic cells require high-tech hardware throughout the supply chain (e.g. when reshaping silicone at 1500°C, and slicing silicon into 200 micron wavers, etc). To compare, Lytefire only requires reflective surfaces, such as glass mirrors, which have a much simpler supply chain, requiring much less technology to produce, with lower embodied energy and: lower costs. That’s why Lytefire is already competitive even at low and decentralized production volumes.

For low-tech enthusiasts, we have been selling our construction guides that are adapted to the low-tech context of simple DIY building. The construction guides are available for the Lytefire DIY Community Cooker and the Lytefire DIY Oven, respectively. Builders benefit from our years of experience building Lytefire in remote contexts in simple workshops, such as in our early years in Kenya and Burkina Faso.

But we are not claiming that Lytefire is low-tech, and that is because we believe that fabrication and innovation around and with Lytefire can be both high-tech and low-tech, and it should depend on the technical reality which one is chosen.

Rather than believing in low-tech only, we believe in user-centric innovation.

One example that is high-tech is CNC Production. Lytefire Deluxe and Lytefire PRO units come with CNC manufactured mirror-holders. The mirror holders are designed with our in-house software, that calculate each mirror angle, and then a laser cutter is used to cut aluminum profiles that force each mirror into its pre-calibrated position. In short: Lytefire PRO requires no knowledge beyond IKEA-style assembly. Other models still require manual calibration after installation which requires a theoretical understanding of Lytefire technology – and a few hours of sunshine. In scenarios where we ship Lytefire PRO to crisis areas, or situations where Lytefire needs to be quick to assemble and use, using high-tech manufacturing actually does provide a user benefit. Still, we decided to maintain the same ease of mirror replaceability as with our other models. For licensees with access to high-tech infrastructure, high-tech manufacturing is a possibility.

Lytefire as Mid-Tech Solution

As company, are we innovating to create customer dependency or customer empowerment? At Lytefire we believe in empowerment and generosity, and it shows in our innovations. So, yes, we hold patent and we are planning to hold more. And yes, we are happy to cooperate with the Low-Tech movement and find hybrid ways to spread information. Some of them are actual simplifications that ease manufacturing and maintainability. Some of them are high-tech. What matters motst to us is that Lytefire can spread everywhere, be used happily by people and have a lasting impact on the user’s environment.

That is why we define Lytefire as a mid-tech solution. A solution that combines high-tech and low-tech as appropriately, maintaining the greatest possible user-empowerment possible.

Urs Riggenbach & Eva Wissenz, February 28th, 2024