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

[Robert Fairchild]

Cecil,
 Glad to have an anthropologist in the game. We need more.
 I'd like to share my engineering perspective on costs. You can't build a $10 bicycle or a $100 car. Maybe we can't build a $4 good stove, because of the real cost of good materials. If a good stove saves 25 cents per day, it's worth $15 in the first two months. That is perhaps a more reasonable and achievable target. (This is about what a low end cell phone costs, hmmm.)
 Bob

--- On Tue, 1/22/13, Cecil Cook <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Cecil Cook <cec1863 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Example of missed opportunities was Re: is this new?
To: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>, "Paul Anderson" <psanders at ilstu.edu>
Cc: "Hugh McLaughlin" <wastemin1 at verizon.net>, "Bob Fairchild" <solarbobky at yahoo.com>, "Kevin" <kchisholm at ca.inter.net>, "crispinpigott" <CrispinPigott at gmail.com>, "Iwan BASKORO" <i.baskoro at geres.eu>, "Marc-Antoine Pare" <mpare at gatech.edu>
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 2013, 4:49 AM

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 CookTechnoShare
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 
  
  To: Discussion of biomass cooking 
  stoves 
  Cc: Hugh McLaughlin ; Bob 
  Fairchild 
  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.comOn 
  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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