[Stoves] Charcoal burning, secondary flame vs no flame

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Wed Aug 5 08:37:40 CDT 2015


Dear Ron

 

>I’d appreciate a refresher on “legislation”.  It doesn’t seem to pop up in this thread.

 

I referred to the CO/CO2 ratio permitted for cooking stoves used indoors in Germany and South Africa. The references for South Africa are SANS 1243, 666 and 1906.  As a matter of interest the USA has a lower limit for domestic gas stoves: 0.8% which is half the ratio of a human exhaling. This is achieved by elevating the pot higher above the flame. Checking the burner-pot clearance between a European and US version of a stove shows the difference.





>I understand that you find it hard to believe that some people actually want to make char - to make some money.  

 

I am not sure why you think this is an opinion I hold. Projection? There is at least one project in India which I have described here mounted by Servals. It is subsidised, but there is net positive cash flow. It is my intention to start a new project this year involving the production of charcoal fuels from agriwaste. That would only viable if it is profitable. That may require developing a charcoal fuel market.

 

>I am again including Dr. Nurhuda to ask for his help in getting a response from his associates in Indonesia who found his TLUDs to be the most desired stove type.  

 

Perhaps you can provide a source for that claim. 

 

>Of course you wouldn’t have found that in your and Cecil’s surveys in Indonesia - with the belief (and testing) that char production was worthless (which you have just repeated above with the word “sin”.)

 

I do not know what you are talking about when you say ‘worthless’.  Who thinks char is ‘worthless’?  

 

We did not conduct any product acceptance surveys.  That is for marketing people to do.  There is a very limited market for charcoal in the CSI Pilot area – mostly for use as a cooking fuel on urban mobile food carts. The preferred wood source for charcoal is tamarind. 

 

I hear two conflicting positions on charcoal: one, that it is universally bad – no one should make charcoal, and two, charcoal is great if it is produced while cooking.  Of the latter group of proponents, there are again two camps: those who want it to be used as additional fuel, and those who want to use in for agriculture.

 

If a stove can make and then burn charcoal, why not do it? It is fuel. Dr AD Karve is a proponent of making char out of otherwise wasted biomass resources. I agree. Turning difficult, leafy resources into a high quality saleable fuel is a good idea.  Processed charcoal (pellets etc) is a high value fuel that can be transported over long distances. No one advocates inefficient production of char and no one advocates the unsustainable use of bio-resources. Biomass gasification is a very good use of agri-waste, as is making charcoal products from it, particularly where disposal of such waste is an environmental problem.


>Nat Mulcahey (World Stoves) and others say they can improve the efficiency enough that not only is there less work finding the wood (which can be much smaller and therefor unusable in most stoves), but they spend less time tending the fire, and they can sell (or better - use) the char  (which on average seems to be moving towards a 50% gain in yield (100% or more with Terra Preta soils).  

 

I have had the energy equation conversation with you more than twice on this list. As you will recall I was an early advocate of taking a systems approach to analysing how the energy in the resource could be applied to cooking. I am interested in your comment about a ‘50% gain in yield”. Against what baseline?  I read about biochar and follow the activities of the IBI and have not seen a general claim for a 50-100% improvement of agricultural production attributable to biochar alone. That would be a remarkable development comparable to the green revolution.

 

>How much testing have you down with biochar?

 

I am not a farmer.

 

Regards

Crispin

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