[Stoves] Example of missed opportunities was Re: is this new?
Alex English
english at kingston.net
Tue Jan 22 07:14:40 CST 2013
Dear Cecil,
Don't I know it. I built the ultimate pellet heating and cooking stove
while living with its ultimate users. The design rocks, perfect
combustion, no moving parts, no electricity required, cooking surface
low to the ground, just like I see in all the pictures. Do you think my
wife will use it? Next time..... I'll have to talk to her about it ....
first.
Cheers:)
Isolated Alex
PS. .....maybe it doesn't produce enough char.....
On 22/01/2013 4:49 AM, Cecil Cook wrote:
>
> 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
> <mailto: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 <mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>
> *To:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> <mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> *Cc:* Hugh McLaughlin <mailto:wastemin1 at verizon.net> ; Bob
> Fairchild <mailto: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 <mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu> Skype: paultlud Phone:+1-309-452-7072 <tel:%2B1-309-452-7072>
> Website:www.drtlud.com <http://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 <mailto: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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