[Stoves] Stove Camp Newsletter 2013

[Dean Still]

     [image: ARC_Logo]

*Aprovecho Summer Newsletter*

August 1, 2013

*Summer Stove Camp comes to a close*

[image: Sidwell_StoveCamp][image: Sidwell_StoveCamp]Sometimes Stove Camp
goes so well and summer 2013 was one of those occasions. Many folks camped
out and cooked delicious meals for everyone. Large projects, like a couple
of bread ovens, were made and used. Manufacturers spent long, long hours
testing and improving their products. Everyone worked hard and made huge
progress throughout the week, especially the two prize winners.

There were two challenges for the week. One was sent to us by Jordan
Kowalke who is working for Total Land Care in Malawi. He is designing a
TLUD that will be used to burn wood chips for which he requested the
assistance of Stove Camp participants. Jordan sent a list of specifications
that the winning TLUD design must reach. This prize was awarded to Mick
Black and Jeffrey Santiago who tweaked Paul Anderson's Quad 3 stove until
it cleanly burned the wood chips and lasted long enough to make *posho*, a
typical meal in Malawi.

[image: Dona_Dora]The other prize was for any stove that met the Tier
rating of 2-3-3-3-3 (Thermal Efficiency, High & Low power PM, and High and
Low power CO). Many stoves met this criteria so participants were allowed
to vote for their favorite. The prize was awarded to David Evitt with his
Guatemalan Doña Dora stove which he toiled to improve all week.

During camp there was a ‘shotgun’ approach of many individual tests done by
many operators. For this we had three testing locations set-up. The two
Laboratory Emissions Monitoring Systems (LEMS) in the lab and a new
configuration we are calling “IAP-in-a-Box”, which is a test kitchen with a
basic hood and collection chamber that holds the Indoor Air Pollution Meter
(IAPM). This system was set up with the idea that testers can watch the
live output from the meter and gauge their design’s progress without having
to do a full test with the more complicated LEMS equipment. The
“IAP-in-a-Box” is being documented for those who wish to test total stove
emissions using the small, portable, IAP Meter. Please contact us if you
are interested in getting a system.

[image: Dr_TLUD_Graph]Last summer people did many tests on charcoal stoves
and it was obvious looking at the results that although charcoal stoves
emitted a lot of CO they were almost all very low for PM. This year we
created a large graphic representation of all the tests on the wall and
added to it everyday. The conclusion was that TLUDs generally produce lower
amounts of  PM than Rocket stoves but there seemed to be two classes of
TLUDS: really clean ones and only moderately clean ones. Both Rockets and
TLUDs were improved by paying greater attention to heat transfer. Even
though getting excellent heat transfer is well described and doesn’t have
to cost more it is amazing that getting more heat into the pot is so
frequently ignored. As Dr. Winiarski and Dr. Baldwin point out, optimized
heat transfer is a vitally import element in a good stove.

[image: StoveCampFood]The progress with the TLUDs was impressive. Several
of the stoves worked well with different fuels and had adequate turn down
ratio. Paul Anderson helped everyone to understand TLUD mechanics and air
control. He was joined by Ron Larson, Art Donnelly, and others who are
evolving the TLUD approach.

There is so much work that any motivated person could do, solving problems
of the poor and moving humanity towards a more fulfilling and elegant
future. Dean joked that even a monkey could follow the iterative design
method and would eventually come up with innovative solutions to issues
such as food drying, desalinization, solar heating, and stoves. All it
takes is making a change or two per day in the prototype and seeing if it
performs better or worse. That’s what we do here at Aprovecho and we hope
that it catches on.

Sincerely,

The Aprovecho Team

  Photos by Simon Anderson and Sanya Detweiler. Aprovecho Research Center
is a lab based in Cottage Grove, OR--visit the main
website<http://aprovecho.org/lab/index.php>for more information.
Please email
sanya at aprovecho.org regarding subscription to these updates.
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