[Stoves] Journal article on household cookstove wood consumption

[Bryden, Kenneth [M E]]

All,

I wanted to bring to your attention our (Nathan Johnson and I) most recent journal article on cookstoves, "Factors affecting fuelwood consumption in household cookstoves in an isolated rural West African village" which was published this month in the journal Energy. Here is the abstract

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Abstract -- This study examines the factors that affect fuelwood consumption in cookstoves and estimates fuelwood consumption associated with the use of cookstoves in a rural isolated West African village with a population of 770. Five primary applications of cookstoves were identified: cooking meals, heating water for washing, roasting peanuts, making medicine, and steeping tea. Six factors were identified that significantly impacted cooking energy use: the type of cookstove application, family size, total mass of wet and dry ingredients, mass of dry ingredients, the use of burning embers as an igniter, and the number of fires used during a cooking event. Annual village fuelwood use for all cookstove applications was 234 metric tons; cooking meals and heating water accounted for 65% and 27% of this fuelwood use, respectively. Fuelwood consumption per person was strongly linked with family size. As family size increased from five to twenty members, fuelwood consumption decreased from 20.6 MJ cap-1 day-1 to 10.5 MJ cap-1 day-1.
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To my knowledge this is one of the few studies to look at a single village for a period of a year, ask the question "what factors affect wood consumption?" and then develop an estimation methodology for household energy use for domestic cookstove applications. Two of the more interesting conclusions were (1) that stove stacking was very common and as a result improved stoves did displace traditional stoves but rather supplemented them and (2) as a result improved stoves did not reduce wood usage at a statistically significant level. I would note that the number of improved cookstoves was small and so a larger sample may find statistical significance, nonetheless the results are interesting and indicate that stove stacking should be considered in our stove programs.

Do to the publisher's copyright restrictions I cannot post the full paper for open download. If you have no cost access to Elsevier journals, the full paper is available at
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544212006317
Alternately, if you do not have no cost access to Elsevier journals and would like a copy I would be happy to send you an electronic copy of the full paper at no charge, just drop me an email.

And of course if you comments or questions, just let me know.

Best regards
Mark


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