[Stoves] Domestic stoves, air pollution and health ==> Back to basics

Thu Jan 12 18:48:22 CST 2017

Dear CecilThank you so much . This letter with in depth  observation about drudgery, market , technologies and research triggered me to express my gratitude.Thanks with warm regardsBibhu Prasad Mohanty

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    On Thursday, 12 January 2017 2:12 AM, "cec1863 at gmail.com" <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

  Dear Nikhil, Harold, Crispin, et al,
I agree with Nikhil's conclusion that the present world level ISO & TC235 approach to the identification of a subset of superior (or good enough) solid fuel stoves is premature. I think I once likened it to ranking the performance of different makes of automobiles at the dawn of auto era when biomass fueled steam powered propulsion was still an option. Like today's  many small manufacturers of solid fuel stoves, in those days there were dozens perhaps hundreds of little companies experimenting with different types of fuel and technologies for combusting and converting the energy into useful motion. 
Testing domestic cooking and heating stoves‎ in terms of their abstract efficiency and health and environmental impacts does not generate much useful information about what types of new or upgraded stoves different groups of stove users will prefer and what are the reasons for their stove performance preferences. 
When the focus shifts from the stove as a combustion, space heating, cooking technology and concentrates on appreciating in depth the functions of baseline stoves in culturally, economically, environmentally, etc identifiable  groups of stove users, it becomes possible to design multi-functional stoves that improve upon the performance of traditional baseline stoves from the end users point of view. 
The aim is to improve the cost/benefit rating of new stoves to the point where the value proposition becomes irresistible to specific segments of the stove buying public somewhere on the planet. Obviously it is possible to design a more desirable ‎"improved" stove which does not necessarily also improve combustion efficiency and/or reduce emissions. It may be  easier to operate and keep clean, vents more smoke out of the kitchen, has more cooking surface, incorporates additional desired functions (TEGs, water heating, oven feature, etc).
The ethnographic accumulation of multi-functional traditional stove performance profiles helps us to:
1.) construct a an abstract model of prioritized stove functions (hierarchy of stove function preferences); and
2.) give stove designers, manufacturers, marketers, regulators, and funding agents a target to aim at when trying to launch new stove products in markets flooded with low cost/low performance traditional stoves. .....or high priced improved stoves which score very poorly against a hierarchy of essential and preferred dimensions of stove performance based on the market dominant traditional stoves, 
The question that needs to be researced and answered by stove designers and manufacturers is what specific types of traditional stove performances need to be built into an improved stove for it to be judged an improvement over the traditional stoves that dominate the local and regional stove market. 
One strategy is to figure out least cost/least disruption changes to well established traditional stoves - and their production by indigenous fabricators - that is compatable with changes in combustion dynamics of  traditional stoves, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency and reduced emissions performance of modified traditional stoves (smuggling changes into the old stove).
One of the benefits from conducting ethnographic studies of the  traditional stoves/fuels/fabrication/marketing /regulation systems is to establish a baseline against which to measure improvements and retrogressions in cost benefit performance. It is common sense that an improved stove with an overall lower cost benefit performance rating than dominant traditional stove‎s will never displace a traditional stove from the local and regional stove market.
I think I have previously introduced the idea of a stove race between alternative stoves targeting specific user groups. Simply record how competing new and traditional stoves are used by particular target communities after a suitable period training and practice with the new stoves. There are simple methods to get preliminary feedback on the likes and dislikes of different user groups to a spectrum of alternative biomass stoves. We end up with different types and levels of user satisfaction or dissatisfaction with new and traditional types of stoves. First impressions, reports by users about advantages and disadvantages of new vs baseline (traditional) stoves, 3rd party observations about whether the stove is operated according to manufacturer's recommendations (learning and actually internalizing a different way of operating a domestic stove). 
It goes without saying that all stoves compete in the same race with no hidden persuaders or subsidies. The playing field is simply the response of stove users to the competing stove products and their scoring of the "cooking experience" 
What I am talking about is a simple minded "free market" stove user assessment of competing stoves after users have been trained to use a new cooking/heating stove and then given the opportunity to use it for a month, 6 months, or up to a year.
What happen when we make the end user the sensitive instrument for assessing the performance of competing stove products rather than the engineers, chemists, physicists, air quality scientists, economists and bankers, gov't regulators, etc.?
 What if stoves are viewed as cultural constructs and tools for achieving tangible culturally specified objectives such as the hearth effect, or insect control, or the cooking of favourite foods, or identity statement, or time management, or clothes- crop-herb-fuel drying, or 'you name it'.Then we stovers have a methodology whereby we can ask groups of stove user ‎to codify their stove experience in terms of the answers they give to questions asked in such a wat as to record stove performance as much better, a little better the same and a little worse and much worse than the baseline traditional stove(s). We end up with an overall scoreing of several new stoves in comparison to the a particular baseline traditional stove. We get a series of stove performance preference profiles out of such a simple and very approximate methodology. 
It should be  possible to  organize the stove use experience of groups of stove users into hierarchies of preferred functions for traditional stoves. We can then chart our progress toward designing and fabricating a high efficienct/low emmission new stove that also competes with the traditional stoves currently dominating the local stove market 
In search and service,Cecil

  Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone. 
|   From: TravellerSent: Saturday, January 7, 2017 1:46 PMTo: Harold AnnegarnReply To: miata98 at gmail.comCc: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott; Discussion of biomass cooking stovesSubject: Re: [Stoves] Domestic stoves, air pollution and health ==> Back to basics |

Harold: 

Your key to "Back to basics" was -- "Develop a standard method for testing the energy and emissions performance of a domestic stove designed for cooking and space heating," 

I wonder if you mean a standard method independent of the context in which these stoves are design and used? 

If not, the whole Lima Agreement and IWA have to be junked. 

And replaced with something serious at the sub-national levels (to be decided according to economic geographies and capacities for intervention, among other things) that respects the contextual significance of "fuel consumption" and "emissions". 

I for one do not believe that "efficiency" and "emissions" are uniformly relevant; their importance - relative to other elements of "stove performance" as judged by users such as convenience, versatility, functional diversity, ability to adjust time and fuel management - varies by context. 

The problem is, how are "emission rates" to be judged, other than for CO, NMVOCs, SO2? If PM2.5, the "box paradigm" becomes paramount, if only with different parameters depending on the context. And these EPA, BAMG wild horses will go any distance to argue "premature mortality" consequences to, um, death! 

The fundamental error was in setting Tiers. I think it was meant to satisfy the group. I wasn't there and haven't heard from anybody present. But I saw your name in the Strategic Business Plan, so I wonder if you have an answer -- can "emission rates" be assigned any rating in terms of "clean"? 

If not, I have no problem. 

Same thing about "efficiency". If no claims of saving trees or monies or collection time accompany these "standard methods", I have no problem either. 

But that means much of the decades-long history of solid fuel stoving has to be discarded. 

Perhaps time has come to do just that -- to test stoves in contextually specified method, but without any prejudices as to the impacts of those results. 
If you and other stove experts concede that, I will be very happy. For a day. 

***********************What this leads to is another way of helping poor cooks. It implies - 
a) Forget the emission-health paradigm. It is too much smoke and too many mirrors. WHO and EPA have no jurisdiction to dabble in stoves policy, which essentially must be contextual and focus on usability of stoves - functionality, durability - for a certain menu and time and time constraint. (Not how many minutes does it take to boil two liters of water but rather, what can be done in 30 minutes, 50 minutes, 90 minutes for a given menu? It need not matter if the menu is the same as in current practice or that the time requirement is the same for a particular task; people adjust. Just give us ratings that mean something in use.) 
b) Cleaner air is a matter of targets, policies and measures for a particular geography, cohort (age/sex distribution), and schedule for compliance with nationally legislated AAQs, i.e., "contextual". It is insane to target only household stoves, nationwide. There is no logic in eliminating solid fuels everywhere as was done in the OECD countries' urban areas between 1950s and 1990s. (They are still used in cities, suburbs and rural areas of the US.) And NSPS process of EPA variety for residential woodheaters is not the answer. All instruments of air quality management need to be brought to the table - bans on fuel or combustion device type, taxes and subsidies to encourage fuel substitution, knowledge and debates. Call AWMA, not IHME or EPA, and heavens, not WHO or GACC. 

c) "Biomass alone" is fuel fetishism. Renewability is contextual, and so is the variety of biomass sources (wastes, for instance) and uses (construction material, exports, fertilizer). Only an overall biomass modernization strategy -- from landscaping around urban shopping malls to making bricks out of leafwaste - can identify where the most urgent interventions are worth a chance. Not - by a long shot - improved woodstoves. (Charcoal and coal, sure.) High quality wood has better uses than cooking, and non-wood biomass (i.e., excluding charcoal) is a challenge for combustion except for bonfires. 
d) Solid fuel household cookstoves will never be as versatile as gas and electrical appliances for food, beverage, and hot water preparation. The question is whether expected utilization rates will ever be high enough to justify the capital investment costs in "clean enough". That points to non-household markets as opportunistic targets. 
Biomass stovers have had a credibility problem in the energy sector (except for heating stoves, where coal is generally superior unless high quality wood has no better use). That was the case in 1983 - when Fernando Manibog reviewed the "improved stoves programs" - and remains the case today. (Though I can argue against the skeptics as well. Otherwise I won't be on this list.) 

But no amount of technical competence is going to convince a non-technical person that s/he is not being bamboozled. The "stover community" has no credible quality checks on the contents of an argument (please check mine, as Ron does). That's how ISO IWA started in the first place. 

Debates over protocols are just the tip of the iceberg. 

If a finance minister or a president were to ask me what I think of TC 285 and what s/he should do, I would now advise "Quit." It's as simple as that. 

Nikhil

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