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

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Roger

>First off, How are you? well I hope.

Things are busy because I am making a major renovation of the whole house
and having no $$ for contractors I am doing everything myself. You know the
feeling.  I passed plumbing and framing inspections so that is progress.

I went to Matunuck, Rhode Island to meet with Cecil Cook from South Africa.
We briefly met Amy Smith from D-Lab at MIT and saw their technology display
which happened to be going at the same time.  We had a long discussion with
the Assoc Director of D-Lab. We wanted to see if stoves would be, could be,
part of their international outreach programme. They have a varied set of
technologies one the go. One I like was a locally made cast aluminum version
of the plastic maize de-huller - the small conical hand-held ones. I did not
see a single stove.

Cecil is now in Ohio meeting with the group that intends to re-start Antioch
College and is preparing to go on to the National Centre for Appropriate
Technology in Butte, Montana. The plan there is to see if the wall blocking
NCAT from working with organisations outside the country can be pulled down.
NCAT should be a major stoves 'guidance committee' and could coordinate
things done at the National Labs (through Sam Baldwin at DOE for example)
and also feed info/people to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstove (GACC).
Cecil is doing all this on his own nickel. He wrote the funding document for
the NCAT in the 70's and has never been happy about its being limited to
domestic appropriate technology. That is why you have never heard of them in
the stove community. They were not allowed to interact with external
organisations, basically. When I mentioned them at the DOE-stove meeting in
January I was surprised at how many people in the room were surprised to
hear that they had an NCAT, and that it had been active for decades.

>.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 a sequel to that book. He was accused of making the whole think up
and that the world did not operate in that fashion. So he lined a series of
people who participated in the economic hits and they are the voices in the
sequel. They explained how the money is managed and hidden.

>.I finally got a decent supply of Utah lignite coal and am happy with how
well Kimberly is doing with this fuel. 

I am glad you are experimenting with that fuel. It is interesting in that it
has a great deal of H2 compared with harder, older coals and it has the
potential to burn very cleanly while being pretty easy to ignite (i.e.
fast).

>.Interestingly I am in contact with a large manufacturer who might work
with me in creating a competitive stove to Kimberly. 

Good news. If you are going to make a better product you will have to buy at
least some test equipment. You cannot afford to guess whether or not there
is an improvement in performance when you tweak something. 

Regards

Crispin

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20111011/c657f09f/attachment.html>