[Stoves] Example of missed opportunities was Re: is this new?

Tue Jan 22 03:49:51 CST 2013

Dear Pual, Kevin, Crispin, Marc, and kindred stovers,

I am a much backslid applied anthropologists who took a 30 year side trip
into appropriate technology in South Africa at the instigation of Crispin.
 Now a days Crispin is still misleading me by asking me to assist him and
the World Bank design, test, produce, and market ever more perfect low cost
biomass stoves in places like Ulaanbataar  in Mongolia, Yogyakarta in Java,
and most recently Battambang in Cambodia.  With fiendish friends like
Crispin, who needs enemies?

Kevin's comic stories about the idiot savant who is very good at drawing
circles around bullet holes is unfortunately a hilarious metaphor for the
multiple problems and predicaments that stove scientists, inventors and
enthusiasts typically create for themselves when they (we?) try to innovate
ever more perfect biomass burning stoves for imagined and therefore
voiceless stove customers.

I recently discovered there is a significant market in Central Java for big
portable charcoal stoves so that neighbours can come together to prepare
food in a sequence of 7 memorials for deceased family members (the last
feast or party  comes 1000 days after a loved one dies).  As an act of
solidarity, families, neighbours and friends get together outside in
courtyards and alleyways to cook big pots of food that is eaten by the
living in honour of the recently deceased.  I have not observed one of
these memorial services but many families in the city informed me they have
a big charcoal or wood burning stove that mainly gets used for these
parties for the dead and for weddings, or by small food vendors who prepare
food for sale to passersby or also by caterers and in the kitchens of
restaurants ... otherwise these big stoves are simply stored in a corner.
 Families estimated they use their big stoves about one to two times a
month.

It would theoretically be possible to figure out what percentage of the
biomass fuels entering the urban economy of Yogyakarta city in Central Java
are devoted to staying on good terms of with spirits of the deceased and
the in-laws.  Who but an inquisitive anthropologist would bother to isolate
large portable biomass stoves used for these important social ceremonies to
memorialize the dead and celebrate weddings as a potential market segment
of the stove buying public that needs be studied, understood, and perhaps
is important enough to merit the design of a biomass stove that meets their
socio-economic needs.

In the case of cooking for the dead and the in-laws, we are talking here
about millions of biomass stoves that are mostly, but not exclusively, used
for big social ceremonies in Indonesia where there are perhaps a 100
million biomass stoves in used with a replacement rate of perhaps 100
million stoves a year at a cost of $1 to $2 each which is the going market
value of a traditional artisan made stove).  The traditional stove economy
of Indonesia is vast and highly differentiated between a number of
different - somewhat specialized - market segments with different needs,
interests and amounts of money to spend.

The informal approach that Crispin and I have used for many years is for us
to spend a day or two together with a typical low income family and go
through a cooking day together.  While Crispin is focused on stoves, the
pots used, the sequencing of tasks and cooking cycles, I take time to walk
around the village or neighbourhood meeting the fuel sellers and stove
vendors in the nearby markets to get an idea about the stove and fuel
supply chains, the mark ups added to the retail value by the time a stove
or 1 kg bag or charcoal or a small bundle of wood is purchased by a low
income household.  One thing we have discovered in Malawi, DRC, Mozambique,
Zambia, and now Mongolia, Indonesia, and Cambodia that the bottom 1/3 to
1/2 of these households survive on tiny daily cash flows of less than a
couple of dollars.  The difference in cost between a $1 to $2 stove and a
$4 stove is huge.  Think about your response to a doubling of the cost of
any big ticket durable consumer item that you have come to depend on in
your daily life like a car, or refrigerator or a gas stove!

What normally happens when Crispin and I come face to face with the social
and economic reality of an urban or village household is that Crispin's
inventive mind is stimulated when it confronts the 'otherness' of a
particular culture of stove-fuel use which includes the traditional ways
that people, both men and women, operate their stoves and combine different
types of biomass fuels to get the performances they want from their stoves.
They know a lot about economizing scarce fuels when they are running out of
money and/or fuel. He can’t help himself. Crispin has an uncontrollable
urge to innovate improvement in stove products as he encounters them in
their cultural contexts.  This same process continues when Crispin sits
down with a traditional stove maker and comes to terms with his knowhow and
his or her technical, resource and financial constraints. It is human,
engaged, and face to face!

This is beginning of a real, culturally contextualized AT design process:
Crispin as stove scientist is challenged by me and indigenous stove users
and stove makers to reconfigure himself into a practical engineer who
accepts responsibility for converting his universal knowledge about
combustion, heat transfer, and biomass energy into forms that will be
understood and used by a semi-literate and pre-scientific artisan stove
maker.  The blessing of AT is the democratization of the power and the
benefits of an increasingly planetary system of science and technology that
comes about when we succeed in translating this S&T into de-mystified forms
that can be understood and creatively applied by artisan stove makers, who
know how to produce a very cheap $1 to $2 stove (which the stove scientist
does not know how to pull off!).  But, the indigenous stove producer does
not know much about PM, the role of primary and secondary air flows and
finding the right balance, how to get the right amount of Excess Air
flowing through a stove, and how to maximize heat transfer between the fire
and the pot.  Crispin needs to learn from the indigenous stove makers how
he earns a living making his traditional stove for 1 to 2 dollars and in
that way dominates the stove market and how the household stove users
operates a traditional stove to get the performance wanted out of it. It is
Crispin’s and mostly my job as a stove anthropologist to learn enough so
that we can read and begin operating within the cultural (ethno-science),
behavioural and organizational system of traditional stoves and therefore
figure out where the best places are to begin introducing changes into the
traditional operator-stove-stove maker/vendor-fuel producer economy.

I agree totally with you that idiot stove scientists are drawing circles
around their shots into the dark unknown of the traditional
operator-stove-fuel economy.  If we continue to privilege the stove
scientist and the imagined brave new stoves he hopes will liberate humanity
from pollution (PM), asthma, and the daily grind of gathering firewood, and
persist in using his western style 'ethno-science' to test the performance
of ‘improved’ stoves to identify the best performers by his stove science
centered criteria we will simply continue to fail in our mission to bring
the multiple benefits of science to the villagers and urban survivalists
struggling at the Bottom of the Pryamid This approach is hopelessly
techno-centric and technocratic in perspective and ultimately doomed to
failure because justifies the imposition by the World Bank and USAID and
well meaning national government of improved stoves costing $10 to $30 each
on villagers and urban residents who survive on less than $1 per person per
day.

We can do better, much better than this, and I believe that Crispin and I
have done and continue to do better by helping stove scientists enter the
mind and heart of indigenous stove users and producers and discovering how
to practically empower stove producers with a fundamental grasp of the
applied science of high performance stoves.  When that happens, indigenous
stove producers and vendors gain the practical knowledge they need to
produce a much improved $3 or $4 stove.  A stove that costs two times more
than the industry standard is still within the reach of most stove buyers
the world over.  A Chinese manufactured StoveTec rocket stove that sells
for about $30 here in South Africa is ridiculously out of reach to local
users of biomass stove, including the three stoned fire.

The last point I will share before I totter and totally fall off my soap
box is that we must develop our stove performance testing protocols around
the culturally and economically appropriate performance criteria that
presently guide the behaviours and economic choices of stove buyers in
particular market segments.  It is also necessity to penetrate the
cultural, social and economic worlds of the stove makers and stove vendors
to full understand why the  existing stove-fuel economy is dominated by $1
to $2 stoves and how these value chains operate. The traditional
operator-stove-fuel system must be allowed to sit in judgement of the mad
hatter stove designer who are beginning to control of hundreds of millions
of development funds for the improvement of traditional stoves... not the
reverse.

When it is possible for stove scientists - who passionately debate on the
bio-energy discussion list - to innovate Improved Stoves with superior
emissions and system efficiency performances that only cost $3 to $4
biomass and that continue to meet all of the critical socio-cultural
performance requirements of the existing traditional stove then I will be
doing back flips with Father William to celebrate their accomplishments.
As an engineer shy anthropologist who has waited patiently off stage for
the stove scientists and hardware experts to recognize the short coming of
the technology centered approach, I am eager to participate with them to
create an inclusive multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach to
the in situ design and development of improved stoves.

I am eager to take my hat off and salute stove scientists and engineers for
rededicating themselves to the transcendental objectives of humanity
serving appropriate science and technology: what did Fuller call it? Ah
yes, I remember, it is his more-for-less principle which enables a mature
technology to become ever more spirit like.  Bucky called it the
'ephemeralization' of science whereby a mature technology requires less and
less energy and material to perform a given function like computing,
communicating, or cooking.

May I recommend that stovers take a good look at what Geres/Cambodia has
accomplished to date over 16 years with a stove improvement strategy that
concentrates on gradually improving the designs, materials, and production
methods of the producers and distributional methods of the vendors of
traditional stoves, and not on the primary stove buyer, the stove
technology itself, and certainly not the stove scientists.

Here is the url  <http://www.geres.eu/en/studies/122-publi-etude-nls> for
an important review of the process that Geres went through in its capacity
as a facilitator of baseline research and institution builder that
transformed the traditional Lao bucket charcoal burning stove into the 'new
Lao' improved cookstove which is today produced and distributed by 35 small
stove making enterprises who between them produce and sell more than 25 000
NL stoves every month.  There are many useful lessons in this *in situ* stove
development strategy which the Geres team systematically followed in
Cambodia.  They decided to maximize the use of the the:

1.      traditional stove technologies,

2.      stove operating skills and knowledge base of particular groups of
stove users,

3.      indigenous know how and business of producers of the traditional
Lao stove, and

4.      existing network of wholesalers and retailers of stoves.

They have also minimized any disruption to this pre-existing traditional
system of producing, distributing and selling the Lao bucket charcoal stove
by incrementally improving the design, materials, production, training, and
distribution of the various 'traditional' role players in the
stove+operator+producer+vendor+fuel supply chain economy.

I think we stove scientists, social science facilitators, funding agents,
and development policy makers, stove producers, etc. need to carefully
assess the relevance of the Geres Improved Cookstove Program for how to
incrementally develop improved 'traditional' stoves that are able to
compete with $1 to $2 stoves that dominate the stove markets of most
developing countries.

It may also useful to review the Genes led Global Stove Program <
http://www.geres.eu/en/geres-cambodia> which lays out a 5 year strategy to
share the lessons learned by the Cambodian Improved Cookstove Program with
other national stove initiatives in SEAsia and French speaking West Africa.

In service,

Cecil Cook

TechnoShare

South Africa

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 2:41 AM, Kevin <kchisholm at ca.inter.net> wrote:

> **
> Dear Paul
>
> Once upon a time, a Traveller was driving along through a rural District.
> He noticed that most stop signs, Billboards, Barn Doors, etc were shot full
> of bullet holes, but that the bullet holes were in the exact center of
> every circle! He was amazed at the shooting accuracy, and stopped at the
> local Barber Shop to find out the identity of the Marksman. When he
> inquired of the Barber, the Barber replied:
>
> "That's the Village Idiot. He shoots first and draws the circle after."
>
> This silly little story contains an important lesson:
> "When wishing to develop a new product, first find what The Market wants,
> and then build The Product around it."
>
> The Patent Literature abounds with brilliant solutions to problems that
> the World does not want solved. They "help the Little Old Lady to cross the
> street, when she does not want to cross the street." Many of the Inventors
> of such products end up broke and disillusioned.
>
> As it relates to stoves, what does Fatima in Egypt, Michelle in Haiti, Joe
> Pattagoniak's Wife in an Inuktatuck Igloo or Mohammed's Wife in a Grass Hut
> in Timbuktu want in a stove? Obviously, different stoves are required for
> different applications.
>
> So, we can configure clever stoves that turn our creative cranks and are
> fun to make, and we can develop our own testing procedures that show how
> clever our clever stoves are, and with such carefully structured tests, we
> can prove that "My clever stove is more clever than your clever stove." How
> does that tie in with what Fatima et al, AKA "The Market", wants?
>
> If the test is based on the time to boil a covered pot, but the Customer
> uses an uncovered pot... fail. If the Customer uses a covered pot, but the
> test uses an open pot... fail. If the Customer wants heat loss to the
> living space, and the test penalizes stove shell loss... fail.
>
> Some forms of "Improved Stove" represent the kind of progress one gets
> when one moves the outhouse closer to the back door in the Winter, and
> further away in the summer. We can build a stove venting into the living
> space that has "an 80% reduction in CO, Tars, BC, and ash emissions" and
> call it an "Improved stove." Such stoves will kill people living in Homes
> built to First World standards. Certainly, there are Markets for which such
> stoves are appropriate, but when tests are structured to require ALL stoves
> to meet the requirements of a small section of the total stove market, then
> progress in the remainder of the Market is seriously retarded.
>
> A stove producing char is fabulous when the Customer wants char, but when
> the Customer does not want char, it is a fail. A stove that boils water
> quickly is great if one wants to sterilize water, but it is a fail if the
> Customer wants to bake bread, or to simmer a stew for 2 hours without
> having to attend the stove every 10-15 minutes.  What is the purpose of a
> "Stove"? What does the Customer want it to do? Perhaps the Customer wants
> an "Improved 3 stone fire that burns 5/7 as much wood, so that she doesn't
> have to find wood on the weekend? The main requirements of a stove are:
> 1: It cooks food and/or heats the living space
> 2: It is fuel efficient.
> 3: Products of combustion do not harm the Occupants of the living space.
>
> Why aren't stoves rated on the basis of:
> 1: ... grams of fuel to cook the food or foods for which the stove was
> designed?
> 2: ... stove heat loss to the living space?
> 3: ... whether or not the level of products of combustion within the
> living space were acceptable or not.
>
> Certainly, other "stove factors" are important, such as initial cost,
> life, expected life, etc, but dealing with the above factors in a way that
> was meaningful to the Customer would certainly be helpful.
>
> There is a Classic Story about the Drunk crawling along in the gutter one
> night,  under a streetlight.
> The Cop asks "What are you doing"?
> Drunk says:  "I lost my cell phone and am looking for it."
> Cop asks: "Where did you lose it?"
> Drunk says: "On the other side of the street."
> Cop asks: "Why are you looking here?"
> Drunk says: "Because there is more light here."
>
> I see interesting parallels in stove testing... the tests seem to be set
> up to give results that are easy to attain in "The Lab", but which are not
> necessarily reflective of conditions that are important to the Customer in
> "The Field".
>
> In theory, it is very easy to get Grant Money... all the Applicant has to
> do is show the Donor that he is the best person to do what the Donor wants
> done. If a Donor favours a particular Technology, then that particular
> technology gets favoured. If the Donor favours a business at a particular
> state of development, then that is the "business state" that will be
> favoured. Donors don't so much support a given technology, or a state of
> business development, but rather, they support a "total situation that is
> most likely to get done what the donor wants done." Clearly, if the Donor
> wants "Job ABC" done, and the Applicant is superb at "Job XYZ", then the
> Applicant will not get funded.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Kevin
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu>
> *To:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> *Cc:* Hugh McLaughlin <wastemin1 at verizon.net> ; Bob Fairchild<solarbobky at yahoo.com>
> *Sent:* Monday, January 21, 2013 9:51 AM
> *Subject:* [Stoves] Example of missed opportunities was Re: is this new?
>
> Crispin and all,
>
> Good comments by Alex and Marc and Crispin are below about air flows in
> TLUDs.
>
> All should note that Paal Wendelbo's Peko Pe TLUD has had some side-holes
> in the fuel chamber wall for 2 decades.  Not as much "early secondary air"
> as Crispin's Vesto.   And Paul Wever has them in his "stove pipe stove".
>
> My experiments with them were not conclusive about any advantage, so I
> have opted to not use them, partly to have less work in fabrication (no
> extra holes to make) and partly because the entering air enters as PRIMARY
> AIR when the fuel bed is above the level of each hole, which translates
> into less control.   I will probably re-visit this topic when time and
> funds permit.
>
> MAIN POINT:  This is a great example of missed opportunities because there
> has never been seriously funded research on the multitude of controllable
> variables in TLUD stoves!!!   We can see the possible variations.  But we
> cannot prove them one way or the other simply by funding them out of the
> pocketbooks of Paal, Paul, Crispin and others.  YEARS AGO we should have
> resolved the issues of the Vesto stove being operated as a TLUD, or as a
> different type of stove.   The Peko Pe features should be better
> understood.   As should the issues of Nurhuda's stove, and Belonio's, and
> Anderson's and others.  Even people who have resisted TLUD technology for
> years are becoming involved and still there is nearly zero coordination.
> And any financial support seems to be by-passing the people with experience
> with micro-gasifiers, and instead is seeking isolated academic modelling
> that (I suspect) will take years to have academic results.  So be it, but
> let's also give some funds to the practitioners.
>
> *With all due respect* for the need for proper "technology neutral"
> distribution of funding, I am getting very tired of "technology neutral"
> that gives equal (or more) weight to giving money (big money) to
> "business-ready" operations that can start cranking out stoves to be
> counted toward the 100 million by 2020.  Instead, the leading technology
> for lowest emissions from solid-fuel cookstoves is TLUD (and other
> micro-gasification), and it is not yet getting BASIC support that is
> needed.
>
> This is how it looks from my vantage point.  I hope that the above is a
> "reasoned statement", not a "rant."  And I am forever an optimist and have
> hopes that the  situation will improve.
>
> I look forward to seeing many of you at ETHOS in Seattle and/or at the
> GACC Forum in Cambodia.
>
> Paul
>
> *************
> Alex English wrote:
>
> Crispin,
> Its been a while since I saw the Vesto. It looks from the pictures like
> there are secondary air holes all the way up the central tube. Is that
> current?
> Seems like the top rows would just be adding tramp air (unemployed air).
>
> Alex
>
>
> Paul S. Anderson, PhD  aka "Dr TLUD"
> Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu   Skype: paultlud  Phone: +1-309-452-7072
> Website:  www.drtlud.com
>
> On 1/20/2013 9:06 PM, Marc Pare wrote:
>
> That cutaway is beautiful! Great example of "let the product speak for
> itself"
>
> Since seeing counterflow in action, I understand exactly what you're
> describing with the air flows.
>
> I didn't understand your emphasis on keeping the flame near the bed with a
> "descending burner" until this paragraph:
>
>  The secondary air is send across the surface to keep a deck of flame
> going at the height of the holes. This obviates the need for adding a
> circular disk at the top to ’keep the flame going’. Adding a ‘concentrator’
> as Paul calls it takes more material and moves the fire too far away from
> the heat of the pyrolysis bed leading to unwanted flame-outs from time to
> time.
>
>
> I've seen these instabilities quite often in small-scale pyrolyzers. Great
> to see a practical measure to prevent their tendency to "smoke bomb".
>
> What's on the "to-do" list for this class of design, Crispin? Are you
> looking to push it into other applications? Apply the principles to improve
> existing design? (like you mentioned with advancing the Anglo SupraNova)
>
> Marc Paré
> B.S. Mechanical Engineering
> Georgia Institute of Technology | Université de Technologie de Compiègne
>
> my cv, etc. | http://notwandering.com
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
> crispinpigott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  Dear Marc and Ron and All interested in air flows
>>
>>
>>
>> This is a response to questions about air and Marc’s tube.
>>
>>
>>
>> Here is an old photo of secondary air entering the combustion chamber of
>> a Vesto pushing the flame to the centre. This accomplishes the following:
>>
>>
>>
>> Keeps the fire away from the wall, reducing the temperature it has to
>> survive (a lot)
>>
>> Keeps the flame going
>>
>> Not allowing it to spread to one side away from the smoke on the other
>> side that might otherwise ‘get away’.
>>
>> Provides turbulent mixing of flame, hot secondary air and smoke
>>
>> Allows for preheating to a significant degree (250-500 C)
>>
> See Crispin's message at the Stoves Listserv archives.
>
> ------------------------------
>
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