[Stoves] Why is it still so difficult to design cookstoves for 3 billion people?

[Dr.-Ing. Dieter Seifert]

Dear Xavier Brandao,

Thank you for your informative posting. I agree with your proposals

and I would like to draw your attention to documents about open source 
cooking technologies (OSAT) which you find on the website of SCI 
(http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Dieter_Seifert)

a) some remarks on stove-technologies:

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/solarcooking/images/8/8f/Remarks_on_Stove_Technologies_-_Seifert_February_2016.pdf/revision/latest?cb=20160519171524

b) about Ben firewood stoves:

http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Ben_2_and_Ben_3_Firewood_Stoves

The whole documentation is dedicated to poor households. Only standard 
material is needed. The documentation (including Annexes A … E) contains 
also the devices for production in simple workshops, so that the cost of 
a stove will be below 10 USD.

c) about cooking with retained heat (a totally underestimated technology)

http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Heat-retention_cooker

I hope this open source technologies may be so helpful, as you described it.

Kind regards

Dieter Seifert



Am 14.06.2016 um 08:16 schrieb Xavier Brandao:
> Hello Stovers!
>
> I haven't posted for a long time, but reading the Stovelist is still a 
> real pleasure to me: lively debates, breakthrough stove science, many 
> people working on many initiatives, with a lot of energy, that's great 
> to see, that's emulating!
> Sorry for the long email, but there are here a few ideas I wanted to 
> develop.
>
> It's been some time since I wanted to share this article from the 
> Guardian, it was sent to me by Minh, a previous colleague of mine, who 
> also worked on the GERES project in Cambodia. I don't think it has 
> been shared on this list, but I think it talks about just the most 
> fundamental of our problems:
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/cookstoves-design-poor-communities-refugees-unhcr-ikea 
>
>
> "*With all the knowledge and technology we have at our disposal, why 
> is it proving so difficult to design and create simple and efficient 
> cookstoves for the three billion people who use them in the developing 
> world?*"
> is the question asked by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, the United Nations 
> deputy high commissioner for refugees.
>
> The question I would have is more the following: "why don't we know 
> why it is proving so difficult?"
> I mean, after decades of stove development and dissemination, there's 
> at least one thing we should know, it's where our difficulties come from!
>
> But here's a tentative answer to Mr Aleinikoff question: the 
> principles behind biomass combustion make it extremely difficult to do 
> stoves that are both cheap and practical, and very clean. But, like 
> anything, I believe this is not impossible, and this is a problem we 
> are working on tackling.
> And for now, when a stove developer decides to make a stove, he/she 
> chooses almost systematically the latter aspect: clean combustion. You 
> know the rest of the story: the stove is expensive and impractical to 
> use, barely good enough to boil water for tea, and users don't buy it 
> or use it.
> I'm being caricatural but this is what happens too often.
>
>
> /*Stove science is lagging behind, not stove marketing*/
>
> I have done a great deal of reading since I've started working on 
> stoves, years ago. Reports are piling in our digital library at 
> Prakti. We will keep reading and piling them, for sure. At the same 
> time I have been trying to extract the very nectar of these reports, 
> and try to get an understanding of what really matters.
>
> In my opinion the stove sector knows what works in terms of 
> dissemination, distribution and marketing. Most of the reports are 
> about marketing and business models. Marketing to the BOP is very well 
> documented. It seems to me that every new edition of Boiling Point 
> from HEDON talks about this or that project: involve women vendors, 
> demonstrate the stoves, pay attention to early adopters and opinion 
> leaders, use mobile phone technologies, listen to the feedback, find 
> financing solutions, etc. I think we know all that. And some projects 
> are working great. You do good marketing, you make a lot of efforts, 
> you reap the rewards.
> But all agree it starts with one thing, it starts with a great product.
>
> This is where the stove sector is lagging behind. No offense meant to 
> all the great researchers working on stoves.
> Stove marketing is currently waiting for stove science. Stove science 
> is lagging behind, because as I mentioned stove science is so complex. 
> Many challenges come with clean combustion. Marketers wait for 
> scientists to sort a few things out: scientifically correct, and 
> scientifically relevant protocols first. Then A LOT of testing will be 
> necessary, a lot of data, to understand combustion, to understand 
> variables, to understand stoves. Then, good design, good engineering, 
> great products. Once the great products are there, salers and 
> marketers and project implementers are reading to pick them up, and to 
> sell them to the BOP.
> A side note: I'd love to see HEDON and similar publications focus more 
> on the hard science, and how to help it, to accelerate it. These are 
> questions worth writing about.
>
> So what I call a great stove is not a Tier-4 stove that works 
> perfectly in controlled testing settings. I am gonna be again very 
> caricatural: Tier-4 is accessory, it is bonus.
> A great product is simply product a customer loves, buys and uses. A 
> great stove is a stove that is used.
>
> Some of you certainly experienced that: you give one day your new 
> prototype to a woman user. Skeptical at first, she agrees to leave her 
> traditional stove for a week, and start using your new stove. You come 
> back one week later. She is using it every day, for lunch and dinner. 
> She loves it. She put her ceramic stove on the side, actually, it is 
> nowhere to be seen. Your new stove has become the kitchen stove.
> It's only for experiencing this kind of feeling that I work so hard. 
> This is when this happen to you that you know you have a great stove. 
> Adoption.
>
>
> /*Cookstoves: super practical vs super clean */
>
> I picture the stove sector as a large mountain, with 2 camps on its 
> two feet. The 2 camps are separated by the mountain in the middle.
> •    In one camp the infamous smoky traditional stoves, and very next 
> to them, the vast majority of users, using them every day
> •    In the other camp, stove developers and manufacturers, reaching 
> Tier-4 in their expensive labs, with complex technologies and 
> expensive stoves. And their very limited dissemination numbers.
>
> The 2 camps don't communicate much with each other. What happens is 
> that often a new recruit joins the stove developer camp. He/she 
> chooses the techno-push approach. The new comer comes up with a slick 
> design, cool materials, excellent lab results. But many restrictions 
> are imposed to the product use, it should take this fuel, not this 
> fuel, be lit this way, be tended this way, etc. And as Crispin was 
> mentioning in one of his last posts, so many important things are left 
> during the development process.
> Great disappointment is the reward of so much of work when the users 
> don't accept the new product.
>
> Priya Karve rightly emphasizes the importance of delivering a cooking 
> service, not a cooking stove. At Prakti we work on the "cookstove 
> system" (stove + fuel + cooking vessel + operator + burn cycle). 
> Traditional stoves give an excellent cooking service! They are great 
> cooking tools! They are just awfully dangerous for health.
>
>
> /*Next actions: a few ideas*/
>
> I believe both camps can meet together, on top of this mountain. 
> There'll be extremely clean and usable stoves, hopefully soon. There 
> is some good progress happening already.
>
> But to be sure to succeed, I would start my climb at the basecamp 
> where all users already are.
>
> What I think stove developers should do:
>
> •    Change your perspective: consider that traditional stoves are 
> great. That they are fantastic. Because people have been using them 
> for thousand of years. They must have something special, right? Start 
> by not judging them.
> •    Spend a lot of time with the users. See them cooking. Cook 
> yourself, cook on the traditional stove. See how easy it is with the 
> traditional stove.
> •    Then build your own stove based on the traditional stove. Big 
> stove, easy to use, sturdy, large opening, easy to tend, large 
> combustion chamber, lot of power, fast to cook.
Give it to users. Have 
> them use it, have them like it.
> •    Your stove is being used everyday, it is being adopted. 
> Congratulations! Additionally, you might have seen by now, and your 
> future customers remarked it too, that the new stove, even if it's far 
> from being Tier 4, is actually much less smoky than the traditional 
> stove..
> •    You've reached your usability baseline, that's your prerequisite, 
> the bar has been set. Don't cross it now. Always keep the stove as 
> usable.
> •    Set a bar also for price. Keep the stove cheap. Its production 
> must be affordable. This is a prerequisite too.
> •    From there: work on improving performance: emissions and wood 
> savings. It will be difficult. But you can improve it, by a lot.
> •    If you are working on a breakthrough technology, see how you can 
> introduce it to your usable cheap stove, without lowering the bar you 
> set.
> •    Work on the breakthrough technology in isolation, if necessary. 
> If the technology is not ready to be engineered into a good stove, so 
> be it.
>
> At Prakti, this is what we are currently doing, working both on 
> incremental progress, and breakthrough technologies. Both are 
> difficult, but both hold promises.

I was saying previously that stove 
> marketing was waiting for stove science. In fact, it's not. It cannot 
> wait. Stove are being sold, marketed, for better of for worse. 
> Funders, programme managers, private companies, want to see stoves in 
> the field, they want to see numbers.
>
> Now, in my picture, I didn't mention that great projects, not only in 
> humanitarian context, are on the other side of the mountain, they have 
> chosen to improve traditional cookstoves, with simple design changes. 
> GERES, GIZ, SNV among others have worked on such projects. Materials 
> must be found locally, price must be cheap. Local artisans must be the 
> manufacturers of the stove. They have had great success, large numbers 
> disseminated.
>
> This is a proven approach, but what I advocate is to go even further, 
> and businesses and manufacturers are part of that.
> It is not to improve a traditional stove, but to develop a new stove, 
> that has the same qualities as this traditional stove. This is a small 
> nuance. And work on making this stove clean.
> The approach is to use much more science, much more engineering. To 
> think in business terms. Make a product which can be 
> mass-manufactured, which can be scalable. Our customers love the 
> portability of our stoves, this is for example something we want to keep.
>
> It is said there is not one-size-fits all. That's debatable. Have you 
> seen how similar mud stoves in Africa, in Asia look like? Close to the 
> ground, big front opening. Why is the Jiko such a hit, all over 
> Africa? Isn't the 3 stone fire the world's most successful 
> one-size-fits all model?
>
> We need funding to go to R&D. This is something I advocated at the 
> Clean Cooking Forum in Delhi last October 2015, and is still very 
> actual to me. At Prakti we've been very lucky to have funding from the 
> GACC and other funders for our R&D work. It helped a lot. This needs 
> to continue, and on a much larger scale.
> Radha Muthiah rightly says in the article that, these are the article 
> words, "the market is fragmented, with a lot of small and medium-sized 
> entrepreneurs who may not have the appropriate design and 
> manufacturing skills". I fully agree with that. A possible way to 
> address this issue is to fund work that can benefit to the whole 
> sector, especially R&D work. Besides testing and protocols, works on 
> materials, work on design, work on combustion. Crispin said in the 
> volume 69, issue 8, that the long term future of stove materials is 
> glass and ceramic, and more investment should go in the research on 
> those. There are several areas that research can explore.
>
> Companies sell shampoo to the BOP, they sell soft drinks. Here in 
> India, cheap smartphones are everywhere. A lot of R&D money has been 
> spent so these products could be made, and now successful technologies 
> and successful marketing go hand-in-hand.
> There is no reason that we cannot achieve that soon as well with 
> cookstoves.
>
> Xavier Brandao
>
>
>
>
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