[Stoves] Free FUEL is indeed REtting around you !

Mon Oct 29 00:03:50 CDT 2012

Dear AD,

There is now far too much evidence globally of well-burning, quick-igniting, smoke-minimum biomass briquettes which are  made from ucharred material to  accept your rationale that non char briquettes are smokey,  therefore one has to charr biomass to make a decent briquette fuel. 

Many will not use char briquettes in fact because they take too long to ignite as is being noted from our counterpart, Fundacion Progressar's field staff in Guatemala. 

The jury is not in on charring as the be all--end all solution fo rbiomas briquettemaking; Char blends remain effective  for certain types of stoves and certain types of cooking and other heating applications but not all-- by a long shot. Chardust in Kenya, Owen working for them and again in the DRC and your own efforts in Tanzania, can only serve a small portion of the population with charring, because of the polluting effects and the volumes of raw resrouces consumed in making char in the first place.. I have yet to see real photos of the charr process as other than lab o conditions,  it never seems to appear in other than pre-ignite and end-result still photos  on any of the char-promotion sites…I can tell you what I see in the field in operation after the technicla support has left the scene though, and its not very pretty, frankly. 

While char is admittdly wonderful for the soil it is far better to capture it for the stove bed or off the seller's stall floor, than to waste the heat and carbon out in  the fields, in its preparation.  The same group wishing to char can just as well set up briquette production in the same field as well and produce the briquettes directly on site.  

There remain many solutions to briquetting AD: Char is only one of them.

Richard Stanley
www.legacyfound.org 

Perhaps you should visit Sanu Kaji Shrestha up in Kathmandu Nepal to see how briqettes are being made without charring and working quite well.  

On Oct 28, 2012, at 8:24 PM, Anand Karve wrote:

Our State Government's Department of Forests have taken the decision to allow people to collect the fallen leaves and to convert them into fuel briquettes or charcoal briquettes. The leaf fall begins in October after the end of the monsoon rains and by about November, the trees have no leaves left on them. These dry leaves lying on the forest floor represent a fire hazard. The Government has to spend money to remove them. If the new scheme succeeds and people living in and near the forests find that they can earn money by converting the leaves into briquettes, they may remove the leaves voluntarily. We are collaborating with the Government in teaching the beneficiaries the technology of charring and briquetting leaves, and also in using the char briquettes as cooking fuel. The char briquettes burn without any smoke at all, and if the beneficiaries used our cooker, just 100 to 150 g briquettes can cook the meal of an entire family of 5 to 6 persons.
There is also another use for the fallen leaves. Rice is first grown in a nursery and the seedlings are transplanted into the field after about a month. At the seedling stage, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the seedlings of rice and those of grass. Farmers spread the dry leaves on the area meant to be used as seedling nursery and ignite them. This procedure burns off all the weed seeds in that plot and when one sows rice seed into the beds, one gets seedlings without grass seedlings mixed with them.  
Yours
A.D.Karve
Yours 

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Frans Peeters <peetersfrans at telenet.be> wrote:

 Dear ,Paal,Dean ,Alex and stovers ,

  Free fuel from woods, its falling twigs,leaves and pine needles also pine appels are rotting !

Not recognised by most folks.

It must be harvested and dryed in summer and kept dry under roofs or plastic film .

Energy calculated for  a  Kg fuel is 4 KWh for wood and 5 KWh for dry grasses !!!.

Dry pine needles  will be as good as pellets ! Free and no production cost if you collect it yourself .

Pellets cost twice as much as fuel wood here !

 Your  5  $ stove made of an old propane cylinder  seafly cut with a jigsaw is strong enoug to last for a lifetime !

If you collect 20 kg free fuel every  nice wether  day, you get 4 ton a year  for heating and coocking !.

So your DREAM is realised !

     We must also admit ,some of us are too lazy to collect fuel and wait for getting subsidies to buy fuel …...

Others have better hobbies  like footbal and robbing  half the world by distributing junk bonds .

Regards

Frans

--
***
Dr. A.D. Karve
Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)

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