[Stoves] Biomass briquetting tangents

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Sun Aug 13 11:21:22 CDT 2017


I certainly agree with that, Richard.

I have seen, as you have, amazing things in remote places. I visited a village in eastern Niger that mass produces sewing scissors. ‎In the area I found fondeurs capable of making one of anything from aluminum, but no one had ever heard of a pattern board or a draw and cope. So they had no idea how to make 10 of something at once even when the local market could absorb all their production.

They were making reasonable knives out of Peugeot bumpers but the handles were awful, wood plus two rivets made from cropped nails. ‎I showed them how to cast an aluminum handle onto the blades four at a time using a simple pattern board, draw and cope (two boxes).

Within three days the technology of casting handles onto knives spread to three neighbouring villages and for all I know, ran wild across the Sahel. The availability of wood was limited and aluminum was easily obtained from smugglers who brought in parts of smashed Nigerian cars from Kaduna by camel.

The products develop as the available skills and materials evolve. Combining materials, like steel and clay, offers a range of intermediate solutions that are better than the offerings of the current paradigm.

Keep on innovating!
Crispin



Crispin , your rationale holds well from an economic perspective  of "producing as many high quality stoved as the market will bear but in terms of local capacity development a different set of priorities emerge. May well be that the rivets nails original metal are not made locally but it's not central to the street fundí what emerges to their priority is using what is readily accessible. If metal rivets etc are accessible they will use them and that should be a driving guideline in our design efforts . Working within their constraints tweaking their available resources and production capabilities from within the constraints  of their local ready accessability . If your goal is to make stoves then your approach is best : however if it the objective of enhancing  local capacity to make stoves then the above takes precedent .

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 13, 2017, at 2:48 PM, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com<mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Crispin: (to George below)

What you describe of Gadgil's - and your - work is yesteryear's. And probably for very unorthodox situations (Darfur) or small markets (Vesto in the Gambia).

Conditions change. Electricity, skills, manufacturing capacity, restriction on imports (or preference for domestic production), availability of tools, Mrs. Clinton's enthusiasm and ISO globalism. As do the demographics (urbanization), resource availability (waste biomass)

My point is that "appropriate technology" of yesteryears need not be the same today. The key idea you and Gadgil had was that "the ‘industrial’ production was done as close to the bulk material source where the tooling could be produced and maintained."

This remains valid, and is a very useful parameter for defining "context", the term I am obsessed with (at least in reaction to service standard and objective). Your recommendation also remain valid for such contexts:

" *   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."

In other contexts, "Design outside the region" and "all metal construction" need not apply, and "country" is simply a political term.

These are the "data shortages" in the facts-free universe of "clean cookstoves" - data are contextual and there is not a single database I can find about the local, real facts of alleged global problems - deforestation, climate change, women's power, or health damage. (Conversely, not a single "stove rollout" has been done on the basis of actual local data on "before and after" efficiency, emissions, women's power, or long-term health.)

The question is, why did GIZ effort limited in time and geography? How much damage has been done by the madness of pushing WBT and ISO Tiers? (Maybe not much; GACC increasingly looks like a sideshow.)

I will now read the D-Lab report in light of your observations.

George:

Some questions:

1. Who is leading the external charge on SE4All when it comes to cooking energy? Is the emphasis only on households? This is important because if SE4All is aligned with UN SDGs, the goal is to reduce the "% of households using solid fuels for cooking".

In other words, SDGs are as pernicious to use of biomass for cooking as WHO/ISO Tier 4 Emission Reduction Targets for PM2.5 (hourly average). I do not understand why this List has not reacted to this blatant betrayal of the "better biomass stoves" agenda.

2. Is there an evaluation of the Gambia stoves work in the past? And to the SE4All Investment Prospectus (likely to be heavily weighed to electricity)?

------
Thanks, both. A breath of fresh air.

Nikhil





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On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 10:32 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>> wrote:
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<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






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