[Stoves] Stove Conf in Poland this month [COMMUNIQUE, non-paper]

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

As we finalise our travel plans to Warsaw to attend this confab I wonder what the emphasis is on.  The title clearly states that it is about wood burning stoves that heat and cook, and stoves that burn coal for heating, obviously meaning’ not for cooking’.

I have hardly seen a coal burning stove that won’t cook so I have no idea why the distinction. In most cases producers of stoves will tell you they burn wood, coal, coal briquettes and wood briquettes very well. The number of true ‘coal stoves’ that aren’t capable (because of the design) of burning a wood product is pretty small. I expect single-fuel stoves to dominate the market eventually, but that is not the current position.

There is a stress at present between the stove improvers and the home insulators. They don’t talk to each other. As the home insulators reduced the need for heating, the stove developers are trying to get ever more heat out of the models they promote. As a result most stoves are used in ‘turned down’ a.k.a. ‘banked’ mode almost all the time. I visited a village in China where everyone told us they never operate in any other condition – just fully turned down mode.

This reality highlights the need for testing in the typical conditions of use, and for there to be more cooperation between those improving the living conditions and those developing heating and cooking solutions.

Ostensibly the conference is about Black Carbon. It is really easy to reduce the emissions of BC from coal-fired domestic appliances (furnaces, heating stoves, cooking stoves, water heaters). It is true the technologies employed are 100 years old, but that is not to say that the solutions are going to be novel.

The downdraft stove was invented in 1687 or so. The down-and-cross draft stove (Franklin) was patented in 1742. The TLUD was being used to reduce emissions well before that – process patented 1707. The downdraft coal gasifier<http://www.bioenergylists.org/files/Coal%20Gasifier%20for%20small%20industry.pdf> – not sure but in the 19th century. The downdraft biomass gasifier<http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/3022.pdf> was well under way in the 20th. All of these technologies produce very low levels of BC.

"This summit of nation states (others don't matter. Nikhil) recognizes that many of our governments have a moral and political obligation to the sizable shares of their populations that are economically disadvantaged and suffer severe winters for long times.”

It is good that the heating and cooking needs of the huddled masses get more attention, whatever they burn.

I have one observation to offer those who wish to proceed separating heating from cooking. It is that in Asia, far east or far west, heating or boiling water is not considered ‘cooking’. At least not by the cooks. Many people cook with electricity gas or …? But a stove that is not used for cooking, does a lot of other things. On the ‘Stoves list’ cooking and boiling or heating water are considered standard household tasks. This there is a cognitive dissonance when people reply “No” to the question, “Do you use your stove for cooking?”

A warm house and always-on-tap hot water are considered signs of wealth. So is gas cooking. Some confluence of approaches by wood and coal stove designers can be found in the fact that the cleanest burners are basically slow process gasifiers that separate the decomposition of the fuel into clearly staged processes. The ultimate result is a gas fire with very low pollutant emissions.

It seems the technical component of the Warsaw Summit, as it has been termed, will be focussed on these advances, even if they are not well known in advance. By the end they certainly will be.

Regards
Crispin

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