[Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

Tue Jan 24 11:35:02 CST 2017

My point exactly. Which I explained in detail to several members working on the ISO standards at the Clean Cooking Forum in Ghana in 2015…

Camilla Fulland

CEO | Prime Cookstoves

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From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Xavier Brandao
Sent: tirsdag 24. januar 2017 18.01
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

There is literally no point. Anyone can send their stoves to 5 or 10 testing stations, get 5 or 10 fundamentally different results and then send in the one that suits the occasion. 
Indeed! Keep playing again and again to improve your score. Send you best score to funders and call for tenders.
Expect for-profit companies competing for bids and investment, to do that! Expect non-profit competing for funding to do the same.
Huge loophole, that is endangering the whole sector.

On 1/24/17 17:26, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:

Dear All

If Camilla can select from a set of WBT results the one that best suits the programme qualification‎(s) sought, and the product is in fact the same, what is the point of setting performance criteria?  

There is literally no point. Anyone can send their stoves to 5 or 10 testing stations, get 5 or 10 fundamentally different results and then send in the one that suits the occasion. 

Two points are supported by these results:

As Philip says, the WBT results are irreproducible, with very sophisticated confirmation by Fabio that we should expect no more. 

The fundamental conceptualization of the test and what it purports to report is somehow defective. It has been analysed technically more than conceptually, but I can add that the conceptual problems are large and require a ground-up-reanalysis of what we are trying to ‎assess and how. 

Xavier wrote:

"I am appalled that we are in 2017, and again another study shows how much the Water Boiling Test is flawed, and is leading us in the wrong direction(s).‎"

Camilla's point is that you can take it in any direction you want. That is from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The meaning is the race house actually running says that is now to win. 

Regards 

Crispin 

PS I have pasted Cecil's relevant comment below this for convenience. 

++++++

‎Dear fellow cookstove enthusiasts and frustrati,

As an over the hill  back slide applied social anthropologist‎ I whole heartedly agree it is time for the stovers of the world to unite and give the WBT a belated burial. 

Why? Because the WBT is beginning to stink. The accumulating human, economic, environmental  and societal costs to prolong the life of the WBT can not be justified. I vote we pull the plug on the life support sophistry and permit the various versions of  a fundamentally defective stove performance test for efficiency to exit the public arena once and for all.

Why? The costs and complexities of prolonging it's existence now far outweigh the benefits of WBTesting to identify candidate stoves that qualify for inclusion in or exclusion from the category of stoves good enough for gov't subsidies, big orders from UNHCR, and investor financing,  It is time for stovers of the world to unite and stop our fiddling while the stoves of Rome continue to burn and emit dangerous smoke! 

‎Fortunately we now have alternative ways to assess the performance of traditional and innovative candidate stoves that are culturally, environmentally, and economically contextualized.  Surely it is time for the "united stover's of the world" to return to a more eclectic and open minded phase of small stove R&D where we allow ourselves the space we need to continue experimenting with stoves as combustion technologies, as heating devices, and as tools for cooking culturally variable foods, and carrying out many different tasks such as small scale agri-processing and commercial food preparation.

 As an anthropologist I tend to focus on the stove operators role and skills, the fuels available and used, the economics of production, etc and how these components combine holistically into a dynamic system that also includes the fabricators and marketing agents. My preference is to step back and to allow traditional and innovative stove technologies, elements, behaviors, and cultures to creatively interact and evolve toward new optima with the smallest possible interventions and costs. 

If we "stovers of the world" actually unite, listen to each other and get better at learning from our cantankerously different approaches it should be possible for us to gradually grow an inclusive eclectic approach to stove assessment that will allow us to select those tests and observations which document and compare the different stove/fuel/culture realities. Some time back Crispin referred to a tool kit of different metrics. 

So my vote is to retire the WBT as an adequate indicator of a stove's efficency. If we had a plebiscite on this list, what are our choices? What do we replace the WBT with after it is dead and buried? RIP!

Lastly I believe we are collectively learning about the negative consequences ‎of allowing wanna be global authorities to PREMATURELY impose universal metrics to rank the performance of stoves that are ripped out of their various meaning givi

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