[Stoves] Biomass briquetting tangents

Sat Aug 12 21:32:29 CDT 2017

Dear George of the J

Thanks. The follow-up point I want to make is stimulated by the fact that your project was discussed previously and it has some aspects which interesting to those planning stove roll-outs in locations where the are manufacturing capacity or skill shortages.

Quick review: at about the same time, Ashok Gadgil and I concluded that the way forward in places with limited manufacturing capacity was to send partially manufactured stoves to the site, absent only what could be made using the available skills and manpower. By ‘concluded’ I mean we both started ‘doing it’, Ashok in Darfur and you with me in the Gambia. At the time Ashok and I have not met or communicated – we only found each other later and got on like a house on fire.

While it has probably been done before, we didn’t have examples. The plan was to make the combustion chambers for Vesto stoves and send them to you, with all the rest of the stove made locally from available sheet metal. The result was a locally fabricated Vesto Junior that has the same performance as a product made in Swaziland.

Ashok for his part, produced ‘blanked’ parts in India and sent them to Darfur for assemble in a workshop that had no electricity – just hand tools, initially. Later they added some welding to further improve the product.

The common elements were that the ‘industrial’ production was done as close to the bulk material source where the tooling could be produced and maintained. In the case of the Darfur stove it was blanking tools. For those who don’t know the term, it is punching tools that typically have a very small vertical movement, used to create a shape out of a flat sheet. It can also be done by laser or plasma cutter, but when volume is involved, press tools are made that punch the whole part at once at very low cost. There was no way that could be run and maintained in Darfur.

With Banjul, the challenge was similar. There is a mechanical training centre with limited cutting and welding facility but no laser cutting or CNC punching capability. The grate on the Vesto needs three press tools to make, including a complicated blanking tool. So the combustion chamber with scores of holes and the grate were produced in Johannesburg – at the contractor that does the CNC work and the SeTAR Centre’s stove development workshop at the University of Johannesburg. That facility was equipped by ProBEC/GIZ in its last days.

At the time the goal in the Gambia was to produce locally a high performance stove that could burn briquettes made for available waste materials, which is a fuel a Vesto is able deal with quite well. The initial target was to make it to last five years, and it is heartening to hear that indeed these stoves have endured that long. Given that there is no ceramic component in them, perhaps designers can learn from the experiment. It is an all-metal stove like the Darfur Stove.  They two products have little else in common as to how they work, but they do share these:

  *   Designed outside the region
  *   Introduced after local testing
  *   Main components needing high precision produced outside the country
  *   All metal construction
  *   Performance much better than local baseline products in common use
  *   Production process adjusted/evolved as local capacity improved
  *   Field performance evaluations confirm acceptance and long term use (displacement)

It would be good if the project can be picked up again and expanded to include all the city neighbourhoods.

Many thanks
Crispin

Crispin.

Sorry my mistake. Maybe of interest to a wider audience. Even way back I always thought that your stove designs never got enough mention. Feedback from the grassroots. After the rains hopefully our economic situation has improved enough so we can go back to the 23 families and do a quick survey.

George

From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott [mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com]
Sent: 12 August 2017 17:57
To: icecool; George Riegg Gambia
Subject: RE: [Stoves] Biomass briquetting tangents

Did you want this to go to the Discussion list?

I’d be happy to respond there.
Crispin

Nikhil and Crispin,

Ebola only affected us here economically. Total collapse of tourism, still trying to recover now. At the time restricted movements of goods as borders were almost closed for some months – high prices for scarce products. We laid in boxes of tinned sardines and other tinned stuff and went into lock down mode for about 3 month – only fresh daily bread. In the end I think they traced the virus back to some monkeys in Niger or there abouts – yes bush meet played a big part and the eradication of forests…

Crispin. Our 23 Furno Ees are still working great for the “test” families – nearly 5 years on. 2 ½ years ago we had a SE4ALL validation workshop here and both the Furno and the Briquetting were included in the Governments priority initiatives and the Investment Prospectus. Now with the new people in Government hopefully more positive actions will happen in time. We also had some serious funding problems with getting messed around by some implementing partners in charge of purse strings – we never made it away from the 1 tin of sardines per day. Amazing what you can do with that!

Watch this space ☺ There is still spank in this old geezer!

George

From: pienergy2008 at gmail.com<mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com> [mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Nikhil Desai
Sent: 11 August 2017 22:03
To: icecool
Cc: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Biomass briquetting tangents

George:

I was thinking of Ebola, but I guess it only went as far as Sierra Leone and not to Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia.

I was informally told by someone working on Ebola relief that the expansion of cities and infrastructure meant loss of forests where poor people hunted for bush meat. That in turn was aggravated by poverty and food/fuel shortages. Hence Ebola.

It is heart-breaking to see Africa return to despotism. Rwanda election last week and Kenya's today, and DRC, Burundi, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Zambia, Nigeria... Africa is at the risk of going dark again.

N

------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
Skype: nikhildesai888

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 8:54 AM, icecool <icecool at qanet.gm<mailto:icecool at qanet.gm>> wrote:
Nikhil

Thanks for appreciating something outside the boxes we create for ourselves – here and in other places. My take is that wood is too precious  to burn. I’m sure somebody did the figures to prove that there is enough waste – natural and man-made – that we can recycle and use, like biomass briquettes, so we don’t have to totally deforest this ONE planet we have.

Combine this with raising awareness at grass roots level, more efficient stoves, intensive but sensitive tree planting (just been reading this from India https://news.trust.org/item/20170809152955-4xaln/ ) AND management and we would be a big step closer to dealing with our issues. The “ever shrinking jungle” goes back 10 years when I joined the list, watching our tree cover in The Gambia disappear slowly but surely. Millions of bucks of project funding spent, mismanagement, greed and corruption under a dictator for 22 years… just the usual human follies…

Not sure about the epidemic you have read somewhere…. I know here Malaria is on the increase again, early child mortality too due to bad nutrition, migration the “back way” by the youth to “greener fields” on the bottom of the Mediterranean, over fishing by Chinese “donors” off our coast, illegal logging of rare woods and export to mainly China. Our new Government are trying hard but the previous guy totally bled the country and a whole generation has never seen anything else so it will take some time.

We did do a stove and briquetting pilot (with the help of Crispin and Richard) rather successfully about 5 years ago so now that we slowly getting more approachable people into positions we will start picking this up again and try to push it forward! One tree at a time ☺

George

From: Nikhil Desai [mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com<mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com>]
Sent: 10 August 2017 16:26
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Cc: George Riegg
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Biomass briquetting tangents

George:

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing it here. Yes, "wood is not only for burning". Back a hundred years ago, a Home Economics student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, had published a paper on evaluation of fuels and stoves, where she wrote (I am writing from memory), "Wood is too valuable for other uses" (than burning as cooking fuel).

Never been to the Gambia but alarmed at your mention "ever shrinking jungle". That is partly the reason for the disease epidemic, no?

Maybe "more efficient woodstoves" will some day protect enough forests so we will be saved from pandemics originating in forests.

Nikhil

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831<tel:(202)%20568-5831>
Skype: nikhildesai888

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 11:06 AM, icecool <icecool at qanet.gm<mailto:icecool at qanet.gm>> wrote:
It’s slightly off topic but I just felt I need to share this.

A year ago I needed a hernia operation and my doctor prescribed 3 weeks of light duty. As I always found it hard to just sit with idle hands I started fiddling with some of our sawdust and paper briquettes and wood hanging around the compound. One year on and we are now at the stage where we want to put an exhibition together – together with other wood carvings using re-purposed waste wood – to be used to raise awareness, show the beauty of wood and hopefully raise some cash to help us in our work. Maybe this can act as inspiration to someone – wood is not only for burning!

Title: 3 – 2 – 1 – Thunk. Human tenacity and folly. Try and try again (hard to see from this angle, but the guy who just got launched is sticking in the boot, head first)
Materials: Briqettes, Mimosa root for the steps, wooden beads and matchsticks, base cut from an old diseased shade tree.

[3-2-1 thunk.jpg]

Title: Hey man – Walk the Talk! Speaks for himself and totally cracks me up…
Materials: Briquettes for the boots, bits of Mimosa, shaped and glued together, base as above.

[walk1.jpg]

Title: Building Bridges. The meeting of “black” and “white” across the chasm – no matter how hard it is sometimes, it’s always worth the risk to TRY!
Materials: Briquettes with embedded wire, mounted on a repurposed Umbrella Tree plank and populated by  "beadheads" meeting on a rickety bridge made from wire and Mimosa slivers.

[bridge2.jpg]

Title: Heads or Tales. This one just shows the beauty of natural wood.
Materials: A mimosa chunk cut to reveal the patterns inside, with a noticeable head...mounted on a piece of  repurposed redwood roof beam.

[16939681_10154847687182254_3846140343269870221_n.jpg]

George from the ever shrinking jungle!

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