Project Planning Tool for Stove Interventions

Aprovecho implemented the Box Model in Excel for use as a planning tool to estimate indoor air pollution from stove interventions with different emissions rates. All over the world, stove projects are working to reduce pollution and their successes help to lower the health risk. Not adding to the levels of pollution, both in and outside the home, is a new and difficult goal. Reducing adverse health effects requires the new stove to be one part of an intervention which includes increased ventilation taken to improve a medical disorder. The box model provides a method to relate emissions rates to indoor air pollution concentrations for a given ventilation rate, room size, and duration of emission.

The intervention involves many infield factors that have a lot of influence on the effectiveness of the whole package. How to improve the effectiveness of a pill in real life situations is a topic that has received considerable attention. Crafting the successful stove intervention requires equal amounts of investigation and analysis. Evaluating the potential health benefits of a cookstove design in the field requires an understanding of the region of study including cooking habits which are influenced by factors such as weather, availability and type of fuel, income, local foodstuffs, and size and type of cooking vessel. A study which compares a new stove design to a baseline configuration must be based on a representative sample of the population which is large enough to account for biases in sample selection.

We recommend trying the Box Model coupled with the HAPIT tool to get a feeling for the potential health benefits for stoves of different ISO Tier ratings for various ventilation rates. If the models indicate favorable results, please contact us so that we may help design your pilot project in the field. If the results are unfavorable, we can help make the stove better in our lab and with cooks at Regional Testing and Knowledge Centers. Once the intervention has been shown to be useful, affordable, and high performance, we can help to develop a carbon finance based business model to rapidly scale distribution.

Download  the Box Model (Excel).

Read  the documentation.

Feel free to contact Sam Bentson for support or to discuss your findings.