One Day at Aprovecho Stove Camp 2006
Tom Miles September 16, 2006
I've uploaded images from a day at the ETHOS Stoves Camp at Aprovecho in Creswell, Oregon. I visited the camp on Sunday, August 20, 2006, on the fourth day. I arrived at 9:30 am while Alan Berick was discussing heat loss in cooking pots and retained heat cookers.
See http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/berickheatloss I missed a lot of the camp curriculum which is becoming more refined with training seminars around the world funded by PCIA, Shell and GTZ.
In the morning I visited with some of the Camp participants including Jonathan who is exloring long term implications of emissions reduction from, Jay who is looking at health effects, Paul with his gasifier stoves, Chris who was running the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ARACHNE emission testing equipment, Ashley, from Canada, who is helping with stoves at an Agricultural College in Haiti, an Englishman who is making heating stoves from discarded lpg bottles and Charlie from Engineers without Borders who has done a nice report on the camp on his blog
http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/ewbapro2006
The Colorado State University students were finishing up their work and leaving by lunch time so I missed meeting them although I did see some of their work. Dean, Damon, Larry, Miguel, Mouhsine, Peter, Nordica, and Dale were very actively testing and contributing. Nordica was running Aprovecho's Particulate Emission Monitoring System (PEMS) The group photo is in Dean's camp report at http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/aprocamp2006
In the morning people flocked from one station in the lab to another to help with, conduct or observe a test. After lunch we discussed global carbon issues and the potential impact of improved stoves. Aprovecho described their current work for Shell Foundation in India. Peter provided an update from Southern Africa. Paul gave us his impressions from the China workshop. And others contributed eperience from stove projects around the world.
About four stoves tests were conducted while I was there. Paul showed me his various stove projects including alcohol burners, and a gasifier cart with lots of accessories. He had brought samples of Jeff's switchgrass and paper fireballs.
I left at 9 pm a little wiser and very inspired.
I have included some photos from that testing. Each test took about 2 hours with setup, testing and finishing. The testing was done with a shortened water boiling test(WBT) Those of you who were at the camp can add comments to help explain some of the photos.
We are in the process of upgrading photo management on the stoves site. In the meantime it looks like Google's Picasa is a pretty convenient (and free) software to use with large numbers of images.
Tom