[Stoves] Revisitng the pine needle issue

[Richard Stanley]

Phil, 
Guess the choice will be ultimately  driven by  what they and their own markets prefer  eh ? 

If one has ready access to wood, and a decent stove, why would anyone want to screw around with briquettes !  

Briquettes are of course only one of several options: They can work only where wood fuels are either in short supply or are unsafe to gather.

Richard Stanley
www.legacyfound.org




On Aug 7, 2012, at 3:07 PM, Phil Hughes wrote:

I have received some interesting suggestions from a few people and intend to try two of them. But, I wanted to bring the topic back to the list in a different way. The "cultural side" of finding the right solution.

I have lived in Central America for over 10 years, the last few in rural Nicaragua. People here tend to be poor subsistence farmers. While the electric grid is expanding, many are off grid. (I am off-grid myself but that is by choice. It wasn't initially but once I was set up off-grid I saw no reason for a change.)

My observation is that the hardest part of "a better way" is how to get it accepted. I was originally thinking that making briquettes that could be burned in current cook stoves instead of tree branches was the best approach. That is, easiest to get adopted. Some discussions and thinking have, however, made me re-consider.

One obvious consideration is that current stoves suck. They go from an open fire to a box you shove wood into but have no draft control and the "burners" are just holes in the box where you put pots. Inefficiency and indoor pollution are the two big problems.

One suggestion which makes a lot of sense is rather than briquettes, make TLUD stoves. It has a lot of appeal as the "work" becomes pretty much one-time rather than ongoing briquette manufacturing. But, it requires people to change how they cook. To me, getting 100 or 1000 people to cook with a TLUD stove is a bigger win than having a few people making briquettes to sell for people to use in their existing but primitive stove. Assuming the TLUD works as described, I think it may also be an easier sell. Why? Because once you get a few converts, their neighbors will see the results: less fuel and less smoke.

Those are my observations. I may be wrong so I am looking for input from anyone else who has real "field experience". Thanks.

-- 
Phil Hughes 
nicafyl at gmail.com




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