[Stoves] Charcoal in Gambia

[Fireside Hearth]

Dear Ron......

         I am going out on a limb here....so I hope to not have the branch cut off beneath me.  As someone who spent most of his life playing with fire, but admittedly not in a college setting I have a very different take towards this subject. 
         The rocket stove and several others like the chula have done much in the way of cleaning up the air quality in many area's it is true. I, however still vehemently argue that the BEST way to fight both air pollution and deforestation is to cut consumption. In my 26 years as a service provider I was working in a small Island community. Many of my clients are still using the stoves I sold in my early days. I got the opportunity to work with over 4000 homes for this period of time and have allot of data about what works in the field...but lack in the laboratory and it's language.
        What I found to always ring true was that there is a huge difference between clean burn and efficiency. Clean burn can be attained by burning at temps above 600 deg c (1100f). My first attempt at making a small application stove for both cooking and heating, as well as the rocket and others will do this. I would call this "clean burn" 
        When we speak of efficiency I think of consumption.....which will also effect clean burn, where as burning hotter will not cut consumption nearly as good as the combination of the two. Let me put this another way. If I were to put a rocket stove, and a stove like mine side by side with a wheelbarrow full of wood they would both burn smoke free or close to it. The rocket will consume the wheel barrow LONG before my stove would burn half of the same amount of fuel.....yes I have tried this. 
        So when it comes to burning fuels which are so entrenched in the "ways o life" the end user is accustomed to, or in the case of Mongolia where the overly abundant coal supply is burned at (guessing here) 20% combustion with the rest being released into the air as pollution. We must find ways to REDUCE the appetite, and burn more completely. These two factors combined will have a much greater effect on the environment, and make the burning of low grade fuels or the Amazon Forest less damaging as a whole.  
        How could this help the poorer nations being discussed here? The average day in the life of many villiagers, from what I gather, is spent gathering firewood and tending a fire....yes?  This would probably drop to only half of the time spent gathering. Some of this balance of tmie could be spent on processing the fuel BEFORE is goes to the burner. In my town this meant that because less fuel was gathered, more time could be allotted to curing (reducing the water content of the fuel)....there could be an industry built around supplying less fuel that is dryer resulting in a better and cleaner burn. Maybe there would be less demand for char making if the wood fuel burned hotter, longer, and cleaner due to its quality.
         I do not yet have lab tests done on my unit that's true, but it does not take a rocket scientist (no pun intended) to see that the stove we built has an internal temp (through secondary combustion) of 871 deg c. (1600 f) and therefore incinerates all of the particulate emission, and one could safely assume an extremely low emission of non visible pollutants (co/co2/ect) that much time is spent discussed on this list. I personally feel too much time is spent on this subject and not enough on reducing the veracious appetite.
         What I suggest is that this secondary process be looked to for the completion of both tasks, and WE find a way to bring down the cost of this process, which I am working on now. I am looking for a way to make my combustor out of cheap and available materials common to the "back yard" of these areas.
         Another subject I have heard allot about is the "top lit" business. I have been told by a local of Mongolia that this is undesirable due to the inability to reload during use. Our stove has it's gasifier on the bottom with a loading door which can be opened during use. The top half uses the heat from the primary (smokey, smouldering) fire to develop gasses and enough heat to sustain the secondary process where most of our heat and all of our clean burn is produced. Our unit is a natural draft, with a 7.5 cm chimney which is 156 cm tall. This allows us to achieve a near zero emission into the living quarters. In some customs it is preferable to have smoke in the house to repel vermin, this however could be accomplished by an "incense" burning tray on the top of the stove to burn varieties of sage which are considered "a spiritual" practice, and will also repel the vermin.
        Lastly I would like to point out that we have been able to cook "anything" in our normal diet......rice, beans, eggs, bacon, burgers.....and our favorite hot buttered rum, lol.
Maybe our combustor could be fitted to these rockets.....the chula is trying to do this, but would need some modification to get to where we are today.

            I hope this makes sense as it has worked in our home for the last two years........sincerely, Roger and Bridget Lehet
                  Kimberly stoves.















 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20110812/bde4d67a/attachment.html>