[Stoves] News: Pico-hydro for electric cooking (Financial Times)

Wed Apr 19 11:42:50 CDT 2017

A message to the stoves list will not post if it is in the CC line.

Crispin

From: Nikhil Desai
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2017 23:09
To: neiltm at uwclub.net
Reply To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Cc: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: Re: [Stoves] News: Pico-hydro for electric cooking (Financial Times)

Neil:

I know a 82-year old of Irish extraction (born in Myanmar, grew up in US and N. Ireland). She told me about her Aga stove.

"When we moved to N. Ireland from NYC in 1946, there were homes without stoves; just pots over open coal or coke or anthracite-heated  fireplaces... I guess a lot of homes in Ireland didn't have electricity. I remember we stayed in a lovely spot with paraffin lighting and stove heating/cooking. Our grandparents had an Aga stove - very practically designed to heat the room, heat the stove and heat the water... sometimes the stove didn't heat well, so to make custard would take an hour... but somehow, the home baked bread - soda bread was always delicious.

Memories... I do remember at times being frustrated when trying to get a gas stove to ignite - with matches.. but otherwise, my mind wasn't on cooking - although I cooked quite a bit in N. Ireland..."

N

------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(India +91)909 995 2080
Skype: nikhildesai888

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 11:54 PM, <neiltm at uwclub.net<mailto:neiltm at uwclub.net>> wrote:
On 18 Apr 2017 at 13:38, Nikhil Desai wrote:

> People of a certain age, or from Britain, may remember the Aga.  The
> name is an abbreviation of the company name, Aktiebolaget Gas
> Accumulator.

My childhood home was heated from 1957 to some time in the 80s by a
number 3 gas coke AGA boiler (not range cooker), fuelled twice a day,
heating water and radiators via thermosyphon through something like 2
inch diameter pipes.  The water jacket cylindrically surrounded the coke
much like a large kelly kettle.  It was so well insulated that my father
found it didn't heat the small room it was located in sufficiently well,
so he bolted a copper sheet as a radiator onto the outlet pipe.  When
North sea gas replaced coal gas, the coke ceased to be available and
various smokeless fuels were tried, none with the success of what it was
designed for, and on one occasion gas igniting at the top as my father
was refuelling it took his eyelashes and eyebrows off!  They replaced it
with a conventional mains natural gas boiler.

Neil Taylor (of a certain age and from England)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20170419/1dff5ac8/attachment.html>