[Stoves] Differences in stove testing (Cecil, Philip)

Tue Feb 14 14:29:44 CST 2017

Cecil, Philip:

1. It is not enough to say just that charmaking and non-charmaking stoves
are different. What is a stove? And isn't it the case that all stoves in
practice are different? There are centuries of home construction and
serving food in inns, estates, weddings, parties, deaths. Not all of them
were three stone or a hole in the ground. Buildings were built to stay cool
in summer and warm in winter, even store ice in some cases. Why this
obsession over design of stoves not proven to be usable, ignoring all
variables in kitchens, cooking, foods, people, just looking at a firebox?

2. What is the objective? It is not enough to say char is a valuable
output. What is the value, and what is the value of the non-char outputs,
presumably heat delivered to the pot, to the room, ash, burns and fires?
What about value of non-fuel inputs, including time, attention, food
ingredients, opportunity cost of leaving babies crying? What is the value
of slow simmering with different fuel type so the baby can be picked up and
nursed, and the benefit of right smell and taste coming from stove
operations?

In short, physical science can do nothing more than pretend. All I ask for
is modesty and honesty -- not just in footnotes but as a preface to all
song-and-dance by GACC CEO, Jose Andres, and Hillary Clinton, even
Christina Figueres. (I will become a cooks' ambassador; we will have a
kitchen quintet podcasts for all boys and girls.)

Face it, every tea is different, every daal is different, everybody's meals
are different. The very idea that you can test for, and reliably predict,
PM2.5 without regard to fuel chemistry, utensils, and cooking practices,
bears no semblance to reality.

I ignored all this back 30+ years ago because things like "time to cook"
were part of WBT. (I have Sam Baldwin's VITA/Princeton book from ~1984; I
remember some cyclostyled manual from late 1970s. I don't think any of
those folks at VITA, ITDG and its offshoots like IT Power and ESD, ever
imagined that their various tests could be used for "context-free"
guidelines or emission rates for stoves and some globally relevant
"standards". Call up the whole crowd of rural energy pioneers and probe
them for the crazy twists of IWA and ISO TC-285 work. (I don't now what
theses WG's are and how a "temporary placeholder" became the Psalms,
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes via NIST.)

There is a simple solution -- have your formulas for "four stove types,
four fuels (processed biomass), four stove sizes, four customer classes,
four agro-climatic zones and four biomass resource zones". Have ten
performance metrics including test marketing results telling us of customer
histories and current trends in preferences. (People change, except PCIA
and ETHOS participants Ron seems to have met; they are cooking different
things.)

Let me call these "benchmark projections studies", to distinguish from
"benchmark" or "reference studies" for a historical report.

Over the decades, the "biomass stoves" (excl. charcoal) work hasn't made
good use of grants for two reasons - i) not enough RD&D money has been
spent on understanding the customer and industrial or artisanal design; and
ii) the obsession has been with saving fuel (or lives) and a single
stove-type, for the "households" market, when more and more cooking, fuel
use, food expenditures, are outside homes.

I think the strongest driver for fuel switch - wood to charcoal or from
charcoal to kerosene and LPG - has been migration and/or change in dwelling
design. Even artisanal stoves for wood and charcoal - with mud or metal -
have adapted to these changes. Why aree "biomass stovers" hung up on
unprocessed biomass of no paritcular chemistry and stoves for boiling water
instead of cooking? Why haven't they developed, tested, and marketed for
100 different markets whose foods and stove use practices we have detailed
knowledge about?

Tami should read that 1909 article - from a thesis at her current
university - in the Journal of Home Economics and dig up from her
university and the Library of Congress what test methods were employed by
coal and wood cookstove designers in the 1870s US and Europe. And what the
Odums have left behind. Joel Darmstadter, Dan Kammen, and a host of others
who have studied households, kitchens, foods, and home environments
(dwellings, water, transport, sanitation) and whole "ecosystems of poverty"
and their transformation by modern energy and market integration.

There may also be some references in "domestic science" methods in tech
high-schools of US, "agricultural or rural" engineers of France, Dutch and
German vocational schools, all about 100 years ago. My suspicion is, all of
them were about coal, gas and electricity, and if biomass, just high
quality wood and charcoal. All these fuels have the virtue of commercial
regulation or self-regulation for consistent quality. The biomass for
today's BOP is of inferior and indeterminate quality, and it does no good
to fix a reference wood, dung, straw, plant stalks, grain husks, bagasse,
or newspapers for a lab test to boil water.

Absurdities abound.

Prove me wrong, or ask me to shut up.

Nikhil

Message: 4
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 18:16:40 +0200
From: "Philip Lloyd" <plloyd at mweb.co.za>
To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Differences in stove testing
Message-ID: <002001d286dd$c0416010$40c42030$@co.za>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="utf-8"

Dear Cecil

It is not too difficult.  "Efficiency"= Useful energy out/energy in. When
cooking, it is therefore useful energy supplied to heat pot and its
contents/energy of raw fuel fed. When space heating, it is useful heat
supplied to space heating/ energy of raw fuel fed. When producing charcoal
for heating elsewhere it is energy of charcoal/ energy of raw fuel fed.
When there are three useful outputs, it is (useful cooking energy + useful
space heat + useful heat in charcoal)/(energy of raw fuel fed).

Hope that helps

Prof Philip Lloyd
Energy Institute, CPUT
SARETEC, Sachs Circle
Bellville
Tel 021 959 4323
Cell 083 441 5247
PA Nadia 021 959 4330

-----Original Message-----
From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of
Cecil Cook
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2017 5:35 PM
To: Nikhil Desai; Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Cc: Crispin Pembert-Pigott
Subject:

Fellow stovers - Tami, Ron, Crispin, Nikhil, et al,

As a physical science challenged social scientist, I still do not quite get
the difference between assessing the embodied heat content in a left over
mass of charcoal and adding it to the numerator as a valued output versus
subtracting it from ?the denominator used to calculate the system
efficiency of a cook stove. If the cook values the charcoal and uses it for
some purpose then it constitutes a legitimate output of a char making
stove. It is for me as a layman unfair to advantage char making stoves by
adding char to the numerator or disadvantage non-char making stoves by
subtracting the energy content from the denominator. These stoves are
different and should not be tested using a standard one size fits all
testing protocol.

It is fundamentally foolish to? test char making cook stoves using an
efficiency equation that adds the heat value of left over char to the
numerator because it is a waste product. If the char has a current or even
an eventual economic value to the stove user then we can add an adjustment
for the fuel it will purchase and thereby reducing the amount of fuel
needed to cook a meal of a given size (which is the primary interest of
most cooks). The adjustment to my mind is economic and does not increase
the cooking efficiency of a char making stove per se!

I obviously need intensive tutoring to grasp the intricacies of the testing
culture and conventions of physical scientists. Can a stove testing
cognoscenti someone please help me out of the wilderness.

In search of a practical path to the nirvana of perfect biomass stove tests,

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