Stoves Camp 2010, Cottage Grove Oregon

Stoves Camp Participants

Fifty two high energy participants attended Stove Camp this year at Colgan’s Island, camping near the river, making and testing stoves, and listening to Fred’s Big Band harmonize so beautifully. Fred and his volunteers cooked breakfast every morning and dinners at nighttime parties on Rocket and TLUD institutional stoves.

Nick Salmons from International Lifeline Fund made a very successful Haitian charcoal stove that was voted “Best in Class” by his peers!

Stove Camp provides a venue for a gathered scientific community to advance knowledge of biomass cook stoves. Participants made new stoves and tested them daily for fuel use and emissions. Every morning the test data was shared and new stoves were constructed.

This year, a great deal of progress was made on charcoal stoves for Haiti. Camp participants, some of whom have worked in Haiti,designed a two-hour Water Boiling Test for Haiti, which uses a Haiti pot
and mimics a typical cooking task, cooking rice and beans. Charcoal stoves were constructed that used less fuel and produced less carbon monoxide compared to traditional Haitian stoves.

See the attached Stoves Camp Report for details of the tests, the interesting findings about the optimum charcoal to use for each stove, and pictures of the stoves tested.

Fuel Briquette Burning at Stoves Camp 2008
Rok Oblak, August 31, 2008
Briquette Burning Stove


Stove Diagram

This prototype was to check the hole of the briquette and how gasification can do a nice job. As said, starting the fire with few small sticks and then after preheating the chamber, briquettes ignite by themselves and burn throughly. You can help flames with having a stick in the hole while burning. I really liked how the briquette retained its shape after it burned out, so you could still push the next one it without preventing the draft..

But the briquette burned with the surface lit from the combustion chamber, as Larry predicted. You could literally walk away of the stove with the consistent flame going on all the time (I guess the briquettes were good quality :) The air inflow was only through the hole of the briquette.

Funny was, that even when one briquette burned out, the next one ignited and the airflow continued through the hole of the first briquette.

Summary of Aprovecho’s Summer Stove Camp, 2006
By Dean Still and Nordica MacCarty, September 6, 2006

Aprovecho Camp 2006 02

Stove Camp 2006 was extremely interesting, especially because we had experts here who could help define what is known, figure out what needed to be done to expand the state of knowledge, and then, most importantly, have the tools to accomplish the experiments.

For Dean, the best moments happened around the table above when Chris Roden, Jonathan Lewis, the Aprovecho staff and everyone tried to get a general feeling for wood-burning stoves effect on global warming. Aprovecho’s recent tests at CSU of greenhouse gas emissions such as CO2, Methane, N2O, NOx, etc. helped to predict the gaseous emissions from the following stoves:
• Three stone fire
• Rocket stove
• Karve Gasifier stove
• Philips fan stove
• Charcoal Jiko stove
• Mayon rice hull burning stove

The gases, however, are only a part of the picture: particles also play an important role in the atmosphere. We learned that elemental (black) carbon particles produced in flames have a warming effect 1000 times greater than CO2 per gram, while organic carbon (white) particles produced by smoldering have a cooling effect 150-200 times stronger than CO2. Thankfully, Chris Roden had brought his and Dr. Tami Bond’s ARACHNE system which could measure the composition of the total PM to determine what percentage of black or white particles were produced by the stoves above. Chris, Damon and Nordica were at the lab till 11pm having a great time testing these stoves. Results should be available soon.

Doing this kind of research in a small lab in Creswell, Oregon for no money is what ETHOS stove camp is all about!

The publicized theme of this year’s camp was a competition to design the cleanest-burning fan stove. Two categories, side feed and top feed were awarded prizes. The top feed prize went to Dr. Paul van der Sluis for the Philips fan stove. The side feed Rocket stove with fan developed by Roger and Sule of Colorado State was the cleanest burning side feed stove. Congratulations to the winners!