[Stoves] China and cookstoves [Was Re: A user-centered, iterative engineering approach for advanced biomass cookstove design and development]

[Nikhil Desai]

Frank:

Users may not care if energy is wasted.

In fact, I have seen only minor evidence that they do. Most of it is
anecdotal or indirect - whether the old stoves from China we saw pictures
of (from Todd, I believe) and other stoves were this size of that, this
kind of airflow or that.

It is not the valuation put on wasted energy but rather the capital cost of
equipment, operating cost and hassle factors, that impede transition to
allegedly more efficient stoves.

I repeat - there is no evidence that minimizing energy waste has any
particular consequence for anything. Much energy is wasted, simply because
it is too costly to save energy.

This, after all, was the teaching in home economics --- a woman multi-tasks
in keeping a home, and has to save on everything - money, her time, food
ingredients,fuel - and has to continually optimize and re-optimize her
behavior so she can place food on the table (or floor), and also has to
feed little children by her own hands.

I argue that it is understanding the home economy of poor people -- not
just doing surveys and concocting statistics -- that would explain why
there hasn't been much uptake of "improved stoves".

Counting beans and Btus is about the same. Theory says one thing, reality
is different.

Nikhil

On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 10:43 PM, Frank Shields <travel at skyhighway.com>
wrote:

> Dear Ron,
>
> I'm thinking stoves not making char is wasting energy. If you have a stove
> that can complete a task and make char you are using all parts of the
> biomass to the best advantage. Much of the heat produced going from char-C
> to gas-CO is left in the stove body - not cooking food. If you can produce
> a good flame at the secondary where the food is cooked without the need to
> have a very hot stove to produce the right gasses for complete combustion
> you can save the biomass (char) left for other uses and not the need to
> oxidize it to ash.  And the TLUD seems to be able to do that!
>
>
> Regards
>
>
> Frank
>
>
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