[Stoves] Designing for the affluent AND the poor.... this is NOT Re: ocean acidification

[ajheggie at gmail.com]

[Default] On Fri, 05 Jul 2013 23:54:56 -0500,Paul Anderson
<psanders at ilstu.edu> wrote:

>Thank you Richard and Andrew,
>
>I agree with your comments below EXCEPT that you did not change the 
>Subject line.   And therefore List readers who are fed up with the 
>oceanic acidity discussion are unlikely to have read your comments.  By 
>the way, I did NOT read those messages.   But I do read whatever Andrew 
>and Richard contribute to the Listserv.

Nice one Paul, I'm always up for a discussion on general issues but
wish to keep the stoves list on topic.

In fact Richard was commenting on a point  Paul Olivier made that
designing for the have nots was easier for designing for the more
affluent who already have access to better technology and it's a good
point. The first model T ford was a crude device but took off because
it was a game changer, look what sophistication is built into a car
now before we are tempted to by one.

Even the stove improvements we have seen since the inception of the
list don't seem to gain rapid uptake.
>
>I am glad that affluent societies financially supported cell/mobile 
>phone development.  A great example of trickle down technology coming 
>rather quickly.   But it reached the poor societies because business 
>found that it could make money off of the needs of poor people to also 
>communicate.  

Yes  and there are obvious reasons for this, the infrastructure was
cheaper because the technology leapfrogged the need to a wired network
but the driving force was opening up a larger market for the
technology providers to profit from.

I'm fascinated by the way some ideas and technology do take off, look
at Microsoft's windows becoming so ubiquitous or even more recently
Google or Face book, yet others which seem so desirable struggle.


> And microchips etc are really inexpensive.   We are 
>unlikely to see similar benefits relating to cookstoves.

Any thoughts on why this should be? Richard Stanley and Cecil Cook
have provided some insights into how the customers view new technology
but I'm too far out of the loop to comprehend some of this.

I've been struggling to keep up with my paid work so have not done
things that I wanted to develop with stoves. My thoughts were on the
need to address a fundamental drawback biomass stoves have when
compared with gas stoves, the fact that a gas stove burns hotter and
hence the delta T across the pot is so much greater. As burning wood
cleanly inevitably  requires excess air which drops the flame
temperature it seems inevitable that we must provide more heat
exchange area for the pot to compete, and as Crispin frequently points
out avoid excess (dilution) air bypassing the flame to make this delta
T even lower.

AJH