[Stoves] LiveWire article on heating and indoor air quality improvement

[Cecil Cook]

Dear friends and colleagues,

Here is one of the most remarkable examples of a near perfect appropriate technology design, development, fabrication, testing, optimization, and roll out process. Crispin and his colleagues in the World Bank, in the field, and around the world have miraculously managed to overcome the innumerable barriers that block human centered tech product development with respect to the many different actors and agents who must cooperate and learn new lessons if a major change in technology is to institutionalize itself among poor and powerless people who struggle to survive on the margins. 

The attention paid by the HELE program to designing high efficiency low emission coal burning stoves for poor folks - who depend on burning coal not freeze to death in the winter - that can be competently and profitably fabricated by local metal workers is for me the most important product design break through. Why do I single out this as being perhaps the most neglected final steps in THE LAST MILE? Because by ensuring that innovative higher performance technologies - in this instance - coal burning stoves - can be produced by local metal workers it transfers to them the know how necessary for them to become agents of their own upliftment. The HELE program gives local fabricators the practical tools they require to redistribute the essential means of production and well being from the big factories in urban industrial centers to tiny boutique producers on the margins of fast emerging world economy. 

There is something profoundly healing - even liberating - when centers of new knowledge production translate that knowledge into forms that equally empower actors and agents at the different scales of application.  Of course not all production technologies can be localized but many elements at the heart of complex production processes can indeed be successfully and cost effectively localized. What the HELE program proves to me is that simple but sophisticated new designs for coal burning household stoves can in this instance unify the ends and means of production. 

It is an outstanding example of science and technology in service of the people. I believe the ghosts of the long defunct Congressional Office of Technology (OTA) are applauding the work of Mr Pemberton Pigott and his colleagues. Kudos all round.

In search and service,

Cecil

Sent from my BlackBerry - the most secure mobile device


	  Original Message  

From: crispinpigott at outlook.com
Sent: June 9, 2019 5:31 AM
To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
Reply-to: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
Subject: [Stoves] LiveWire article on heating and indoor air quality improvement


Dear Friends

There is a LiveWire article on the Kyrgyzstan Heating Stove pilot just published at

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/31774

"Chronic underheating is commonplace among poor households in cold-climate regions of developing countries beyond the reach of district heating and gas-distribution networks. Until fuel switching is possible, high-efficiency, low-emissions (HELE) technologies offer a cost effective, intermediate solution to meet the heating aspirations of underserved populations. Recent pilot experience in Kyrgyzstan shows that switching to HELE heating stoves yields substantial benefits, including dramatically reduced emissions, better health, and savings in household fuel expenditure."
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31774

It is essentially a precis of the full paper presented as responses to a set of standard questions.

The Winter Heating Pilot covered stoves burning coal, wood and dung. All three are widely used in rural areas, often in combination (fuel stacking).  Cooking, heating, baking bread and making tea are often done using separate devices (stove stacking).

Quite significant improvements were made for stoves using all three fuels, as testified by the indoor air quality measurements of personal exposure.  Fuel savings were typically 40% compared with the old stoves.

Best regards
Crispin

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