[Stoves] High mass space heating options Re: Rocket Stove for the PLACE

Mon Oct 10 23:45:52 CDT 2011

Crispin, 

        First off, How are you? well I hope.

               I thank you again for your input, and feel you are probably right. It would seem to me that IF there is a benefit to all of this then studying how mother nature intended for this to work naturally would unlock any secret answers to it's importance and possible success. The way things are done now just seems to continue the hopeless quest of trading those pesky little dollar bills that our society has become so addicted to. Right along with that comes the end of our reading the "confessions of an economic hit man" and the watching of "blue water wars". I honestly am a bit lost this week as it just seems like I should spend the rest of my life partying as there is no hope of "saving the planet" and certainly not the majority of it's populous. Honestly I just wanted to stay in bed all day and when I got up everything I touched turned to crap. 
               There is one thing good in the last week however. I finally got a decent supply of Utah lignite coal and am happy with how well Kimberly is doing with this fuel. We will be going to the factory at weeks end to pick up the next load of stoves with the final corrections I asked for. I am excited to see how this version reacts both with wood and coal as I believe I have dialed in what I am after, then we can get the testing done that I mentioned.
               Interestingly I am in contact with a large manufacturer who might work with me in creating a competitive stove to Kimberly. We also are interested in building stoves which will cost allot less, but incorporate the same combustion technology.......maybe something good will come of that.

         Roger

From: crispinpigott at gmail.com
To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:43:53 -0400
Subject: Re: [Stoves] High mass space heating options Re: Rocket Stove for	the PLACE


Dear Roger >In this thinking I bring up the "Russian fireplace", The oldest and most widely used High Mass heater I have known in my 26 years. They are typically loaded up with 80 lbs of fuel and burned off one or two times per day. That’s up to 160 pounds every 24 hours, and no char is left. I believe that the common EPA certified wood stove can provide just as much "useable" heat to ones home with a lot less fuel, and no char is left. 
>        So, I am asking out loud.......are we better off selecting the heat source that gets more for our waning resources, and maybe asking if there is another medium for giving a home to these microbial critters other than just the "char". As I was pointing out at length, having an efficient heater (when it is running) is quite different from having a high efficiency all the time. Fires have a habit of going out and at time, very different physics come into play. You have probably heard that most fireplaces give almost no net benefit to the house. This is certainly true of large old ones with a large chimney. They pull so much cold air into the house and toss hot air up the chimney that there is no net benefit. You are only warm if you sit beside the fire which is exactly what people used to do. They had burning faces and frozen butts. This issue is not nearly resolved yet. There are ways to run an EPA-certified stove that wastes huge amounts of heat so one has to tie the claims of fuel saving to overall thermal efficiency. It has to be operated correctly. Rare is the stove that properly operates itself. There are very few people who toss left over char into the next fire. So burning the fuel you have collected/paid for is one way to increase efficiency. The drive to create char has a couple of roots. One was an inability to make clean burning stoves. It was found that simple batch-loaded TLUD stoves that were so choked for primary air that they made charcoal, were surprisingly clean. That is because, it was believed at the time, they were not burning the carbon, or most of it. Well, that is interesting, but it wastes a lot of fuel that should have been burned. The obvious risk is that it the stove is not thermally much more efficient, people will go out and cut additional biomass to feed the stove that does not burn all the fuel. Enter the bio-char enthusiasts. They want to put char into the garden to help with production of food. There are many claims and many disappointments all over the world. There are successes and they tend to be smaller in number than the claims and the failures. That is OK, research will fix up the knowledge base and common sense will prevail. Don’t fret. It is a very big question as to whether or not one can make meaningful amount of char with a stove. Meaningful means having a return on crops that more than compensates for the collection (possibly) of additional fuel and the effort to move that fuel to the kitchen and the char back again. So far I have not seen a single case where this is going to be economically viable on its own. Enter the Climate people. They want to burn (sequester) carbon in the ground on the understanding that if it is left there it will a) not re-emerge for a very long time, b) will take carbon out of the air (biomass) and put it in the ground, c) produce sufficient quantities of carbon offsets that they may be sold to a willing buyer (probably in Europe) and d) bring some arguable agricultural benefit – which is still being argued. Notice that the plot has not become very complicated. The original problem was not that we should build pyrolysers for the good of our health, but that we could not apparently build good stoves for our health. Those days are long gone. We can easily build very clean wood or other biomass stoves that do not produce char. The original argument has fallen away, first to fan stoves and then to a new generation of natural draft stoves. As many of the touted stoves that produce char (but not all) cost more than people are willing to pay, the carbon trading folk are devising methods of subsidising them from CDM sales or the Gold Standard markets. This is, long term, a risky proposition upon which to base a business plan because the carbon market is looking shakier by the year – and that has nothing at all to do with the worthiness of carbon/climate arguments, it is purely economic. There is a window which is rapidly closing. After about 9 more months, that window will close. If you want a CDM funded stove programme (which is a very expensive thing to create and moderate) it will have to be submitted by July next year. After the end of the Kyoto Accord there is no plan in place to continue it. Many countries and most notably China and Japan have said they will definitely not participate. As China’s per-capita carbon emissions exceed the USA’s (or almost –will be true soon) they are a gigantic emitter and if they are not playing along in the carbon trading, the other countries will find they cannot compete economically. CDM contracts will run at a maximum to 2020. After that – zilch for burying a few grams a day of char from a stove. We can’t tell exactly what happen 9 years from now, but you can bet that if the temperature continues to drop in the USA (winter temp is presently falling at 3.8 deg per decade) there will be little enthusiasm from the USA either. That leaves Europe and they can’t go it alone. Too expensive. So….if you want to promote char making stoves for agricultural reasons, and you do not want to be accused of making the biomass shortage worse than it is already, you will have to show that you are using a) a fuel that is not currently being used (and wasted) or b) you are using a fuel so economically that the total fuel required is reduced, or c) that you are balancing your stove programme with a tree planting/ resource-creating activity that goes with it. In physics there is no free lunch. If the stove does not save fuel and produce char on the side, it is going to face programmatic problems. Such a thing is possible, but if have no carbon argument, you are left with fuel efficiency. Any stove that burns the whole fuel is going to outperform any char producing stove. Simple as that. If biochar turns out to be a winner in all cases, or most, it will definitely be more efficient to produce it under controlled circumstances near the source so only the carbon is shipped, not the rest of the matter and moisture in it. That is simple math. If you happen to have some char production, by all means throw it into the ground near something that will benefit from it. But it would be better to put it into the next fire and get that sweet heat without having to lift another finger, or axe. RegardsCrispin 
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