[Stoves] Usability of stoves - what lessons from Ethiopia Mirte experiment?

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

>I wonder if there were any usability tests. In US regulatory practice, there is a term I like - declaring an investment "used and useful" before allowing the investor to earn a regulated return on it. There are so many "improved biomass stoves"; I wonder if anybody has tried to estimate which designs are "used and useful".

This is a very good question. There is usually a pretty significant gap between what stove project staff consider ‘improved’ and what users consider ‘improved’.  This was highlighted during the Ulaanbaatar Clear Air Project UBCAP. The goal of the users (fuel efficiency) was not aligned with the primary goal of UBCAP which was (and still is) a reduction in the emission of PM2.5.

We discussed it frankly in 2008-2009. In order to succeed the stoves promoted had to address both constituencies. It is clear from observations and interviews that everyone in the city is concerned with ambient air quality, but there is a much lesser response when an individual’s own behaviour is involved. Generally people were not willing to be PM-martyrs with regard to their own emissions.

So the selection of supported stoves was done on the basis of a combination of two improvements and one ‘do no harm’ rule. PM had to be down 80%, then 90% over the baseline, the fuel efficiency had to be improved to the point that it met common regional standards, which are 70% in most cases, and finally, the CO produced per delivered MJ should not be higher. In practise, the CO was reduced because taking care of the combustion quality generally improves CO as well so it became a non-issue.

It is a reasonable example of attracting adoption over a performance metric that was low on the concern list of the individual home owner, but high on the list of the funder.

>Xavier Brandao had sent a very powerful post on 4th August 2016, asking for a focused R&D effort.
And he hit that point well. It has proven very difficult to get support for product development. One of the reasons is that innovators have shouted ‘improved’ so many times, that it is widely assumed that the improved stoves needed to address (all) development goals already exist. This is a common perception among those working outside this sector.
Stove / air quality / fuel saving projects are frequently based on the following plan:

1.       Raise funds with various promises of deliverables such as access to modern energy, fuel saving (tree saving), air quality improvement (based on some of the wonkiest science in the sector), reduction of drudgery and once again, against the grain of evidence, a reduction in ‘sexual violence against women’. All these things save the last are common elements of stove projects.

2.       Survey the market for improved stoves, which clearly they consider to already exist.

3.       Test them and pick ‘the best one(s)’.

4.       Promote the best one(s) by reducing the costs associated with promoting and adopting them.
So, where in the list do you see the development of appropriate products? Very few organisations have done that – far fewer than those fitting the above over-generalisation. Practical Action should be praised for their work in Darfur during which they worked assiduously to make a usable stove from local materials that consistently saved 50% of the fuel in that cooking context. You can read about the Stove Wars of Darfur in the works of Samer Abdelnour who documented what happened during a time when people were given as many as 10 different stoves all said to be ‘improved’.
Next I can point to a stove that was developed from the ubiquitous Keren Stove in Indonesia. It is called the Keren Super. Its main feature is that it doesn’t appear to have any features at all – it looks almost exactly like the traditional Keren. The big reason people like it so much is that it saves a lot of fuel, particularly when it is cooking for a long time. It burns the same fuels, has the same controllability and has the same long term cost and comes from the same traditional artisans.  It can, like the traditional version, be made in different qualities, sizes, casings and so on, to suit market price segments.
The development of the product was done within the CSI-Indonesia Pilot Project, though not specifically as a named activity. In a sense it was tolerated because it happened and had promise. It may turn out to be the most popular product promoted. If so, it really is worth studying why.
Next is the stove programme of CARITAS Switzerland which is in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, mostly the former. This has a specific mandate to develop better products and has had for several years – at least four. Through that effort new ideas have been introduced that seem to be acceptable to the families they hoped to assist. Once there are some proofs of acceptance, they can be supported over the whole region. Yesterday I saw some great photos (which I will try to share) from the project Fresh Air in Kyrgyzstan. They show the conditions in which people are living, and the fuels available. For a designer it is very disciplining to be required to meet the needs of the families using only the materials and fuels available.
The solutions they have now are by no means loved – even if they are effective enough. There are all sorts of problems with traditional stoves and we should be keenly aware of their shortcomings if we want to have new ‘better’ products adopted easily. I observe that improved performance is immediately appreciated. Major issues are:

Time and attention needed to run the stove (frequently having to go to the stove and do something)

Fuel preparation (all fuels need to be prepared by someone, even LPG)

Leaks of smoke from the stove body/top

Smoke leaks from the heating wall or brick chimney

Poor cooking performance

Condensation issues (extracting too much heat from the gas stream – through this is not an adequate explanation of the problem)

A ‘flash in the pan’ heating cycle: big heat followed by a lingering fire

A need to burn two or three fuels together to get the cheapest ones to burn well (cotton stalks, dung, sawdust, coal dust, crop wastes)


If the problems are addressed ‘in the bargain’ then the performance attributes that are appreciated by the donor/project can be ‘smuggled’ into the plan, as Cecil would say.
So what then is the problem? Basically, the belief that the solutions already exist. That is the big impediment. So many people claim to have solved the problems, before they have even been delineated, there has been generated an aura of finality about the product development cycle. Others have declared that the problem is not solvable with ‘solid fuels’ and everyone has to move to electricity and gas. I like electricity and gas and use both myself, but we have to be realistic – not in the sense that we will tolerate solid fuels for a while, the GACC approach, but that we should use the Mongolian approach: admit that the fuel will remain the same for the foreseeable future and learn to get drastically better performance from it, perhaps even better than electricity and gas, all things considered.
This has raised a strange bifurcation in the stove community – those who declare that solid fuels cannot be burned cleanly (or at low enough cost) or at all, and those who are carrying on to do so in spite of numerous historical failures. Guess who is winning the battle against poor performance?
The infamous claim in the document known as the Stove Comparison Chart (in the introduction) that ultra-clean Mongolian stoves ‘only appear to be clean’ has generated a joke about Ulaanbaatar PM2.5 where the air quality was improved by 65% in 4 years (because of the stove exchange programme) in spite of no change in the fuel and an increasing population. The joke is that the air ‘only appears to be clean’ because they continue to burn lignite. It can only ‘really be clean’ if they change fuels to something far more expensive like semi-coke briquettes or LPG.
As you can imagine, Mongolians are happy with their air that ‘appears to be clean’, a consequence of their stoves that ‘only appear to be clean’.
There are stoves all over the place being promoted that ‘only appear to cook’. In reply the cooks are voting with their wallets and/or their feet.
Regards
Crispin
PS Did you know it is possible to make an ‘improved mitad’?
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