Paul Anderson, March, 2009 How many of each major type of cookstoves exist in the developing societies(functioning in 2009)? The attached "draft" Matrix gives you my guesses. Perhaps YOU have additional input. Maybe we should change the Matrix. More columns, more lines. Or do you agree with what content? What I am attempting is to get us all reasonably "on the same page", literally on the same single page. Please look carefully at the two Notes at the bottom. In the general rank ordering, any stove type (or specific stoves within a type) might be shifted one or two columns to the left or right. But the question is, are the notes and orderings reasonably correct? There is no right or wrong, best or worst. By sheer numbers of units, the 3-stove fire is "best." It literally is "the competition to beat" for all of the other stoves. The file is an active MS Word document ( .doc), so you can change it as you please, but please indicate that you have altered it. (I desire neither the glory nor the blame for what you contribute.) It is a very small file and might be distributed with this message.

Hello stoves community,

At ETHOS 2009 we held a panel on stove safety, bringing in viewpoints from corporate standards development, national standards certification, and small to medium scale developers. The team led by Nathan Johnson (Iowa State University) included Crispin Pemberton-Pigott (New Dawn Engineering), Casper Thijssen (Philips), and Karabi Dutta.

The panel gave a comparative analysis of how different stove industries (multinational corporations, medium-scale companies, NGOs, small developers, etc.) addressed fundamental stove safety questions. These topics included:

a) applicability of standards and regulation;
b) incentives and benefits
c) facilities and equipment availability
d) cost vs. benefit
e) resulting action

We determined that each type of industry has a different perspective that influences their path or actions towards a safer stove. And that all sub-industries may not produce safer stoves given the same incentive mechanisms or policies. As such more than one path to safety may be needed to reach the greatest amount of end-users (and producers). The panel ended the discussion with an overview present work in stove safety with recommendations for next steps.

Please view the attached file for more details. I will be leading a group in 2009 to work on the following: assemble database of injury data, b) analyze incentive mechanisms, cost/ benefit, c) development of lab testing procedures for different stove categories, d) publication of findings/ results, and e) look for partnerships with international agencies to support safer stove design and production.

Please contact me if you have any questions. There will be more updates to follow. Best,
Nathan Johnson
atlas@iastate.edu
PhD Candidate, Mechanical Engineering, International Development
Iowa State University

Kevin Chisholm, December 2005

Dear All,

Would you think it would be helpful if the Stoves List posed a "General Specification" for stoves?

1: PERMISSIBLE COST:
What is the maximum cost of the stove delivered to the "Customer", in $US equivalent?
What is the maximum allowable cost for installation?

2: COOKING TASK:
Boiling water? Stewing? Frying? Baking?

T. B. Reed and Ron Larson

*Presented at the "Developments in Thermochemical Biomass Conversion" Conference, Banff, Canada, 20-24 May, 1996.

Introduction -

A.The Problem

Since the beginning of civilization wood and biomass have been used for cooking. Over 2 billion people cook badly on inefficient wood stoves that waste wood, cause health problems and destroy the forest. Electricity, gas or liquid fuels are preferred for cooking - when they can be obtained, but they depend on having a suitable infrastructure and are often not available in developing countries. In the last few decades, many improved wood stoves have been developed (the Chula, the Hiko, the Maendeleo, the Kuni Mbili, etc.), but the new wood stoves are often more difficult to manufacture, often more heat goes to the stove than to the food, and they do not offer good control of cooking rate. They are not always accepted by the cooks for whom they are developed.[1] Because of the problems of wood cooking, people often cook over charcoal. However, charcoal manufacture is very wasteful of energy and very polluting, so the problems of the wood stove are externalized but not solved.

A.THE SOLUTION

Gas is preferred for cooking wherever it is available. Gas can be made from wood and biomass in gasifiers developed in this century, but these gasifiers are generally too big for home use. A downdraft stove for domestic cooking is now being manufactured in China.[2] We have developed a new "inverted downdraft gasifier" stove shown in Fig. 1. It operates using only natural convection. The rate of gas production and heating is controlled by the primary air supply to the gasifier. As an option, the gasifier can make charcoal with a 20-25% yield. The wood-gas stove consists of an "inverted downdraft gasifier" (shown in Fig. 2) plus a burner to mix air and gas and burn cleanly (Fig. 3). These sections are discussed below. The stove has been started and operated indoors with no exhaust fans and no odor of burning wood. However, we believe that there is still much work to be done in optimizing the stove for various fuels, adapting it to various cooking situations and developing other uses. For that reason we are publishing our preliminary results and hope that others will help adapt these principles to improve world cooking and wood conservation.