[Stoves] PM emissions from engines

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Wed Jun 7 18:25:38 CDT 2017


>Tracking BC emissions at the level of individual users in the name of saving the cryosphere is sheer lunacy.
When addressing a regional air quality problem (BC is one) the sources have to be addressed en masse. That is how the air in Hebei is being improved. There are >8m farmers’ homes. Each one is a contributor to Beijing’s PM2.5.
>1. I don't understand "The outdoor air is extremely clean in KG." Were all heating stoves emitting only indoors with no ventilation or leakage?
All the stoves we removed were very leaky and were vented outside. The pollution that goes outside is not a factor in indoor air quality. Some have said that all polluting stoves that send gunk up the chimney pollute the air of someone else’s home. While theoretically possible, this is not meaningful as a source of IAP outside a couple of cities. The dilution is very high.

>2. The parts of Malawi I have travelled - Lilongwe, Blantyre, down south to a distillery, east to the lake, and places in between - do not get as cold as Central Asia (of which I only know Afghanistan and Mongolia). I assume dwellings and neighborhoods to be different, as also the baseline nutrition and health characteristics.
That is a significant difference in the locales, however the core of the investigation was to remove over 90% if IAP by changing the stove. In Malawi the outdoor air was a confounding factor. That doesn’t mean the studies were not functionally the same.
>In any case, I do not have much interest in small-scale, short-term results that carry too many qualifications for any generalizations and too little information for context-specific design of stoves or interventions.
Then you will be an enthusiastic supported of the WB projects in Mongolia, KG and TJ. All of them are attempting to completely transform the small stove sector by introducing radically improved designed selected for their adoptability by the informal sector, and which can completely replace all the traditional stoves. This will be accomplished by having the service factor so much higher with the new products that they are irresistible. In order to do that, they have to measure at least as good on all performance measures – according to the cooks. The point of contextual testing is to make assessments on performance and usability based on the cultural requirements. Such stoves can also have side benefits of addressing ambient air quality problems and save fuel expenses.
>To me, quantification of "health impacts of stoves" is a red herring, as is everything else the stover community has blindly worshipped over the years - forests, climate stability, protection of the weak.
There are severe health problems in 100% of homes in rural Kyrgyzstan cause by stoves, particularly home-made ones where the fabricator has no real understanding of combustion. The winter pilot showed that these health problems can be substantially addressed with a combination of better design and installation. Leak-free = smoke-in-the-house-free.
>I see the "dirty cooking" problem not primarily as a health problem, as Kirk Smith argues, but as a poverty problem.
Agreed. When people have more money, they heat to a higher temperature and cook cheaper foods that take longer to prepare.  When the stoves are good enough, people will revert from electricity to coal and wood. Electricity has lots of problems.
>…how are different poverty processes playing out in the kitchens and the hearths?
My first answer is that we have to address, in our planning, chronic under-heating as a major health concern. IAP just makes bad things worse.
>Don't worry; the market for space heating - cleaner, safer, more comfortable, modern space heating technologies - will keep growing.
Agreed.
Crispin

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