Thanks to Robert Fairchild for sending this reminder that what we call a “Haybox” cooker has a lot of history behind it! Of course fireless cooking methods have been used since ancient times, but fireless cookers began to be introduced to U.S. in the mid 1800s, becoming commercially manufactured and quite popular in the US […]
On the front porch of the house he built in West Eugene, Ken Goyer shows an example of the Six Brick Rocket Stove Photo by Paul Neevel for the Eugene Weekly I think about Ken making the lightweight, insulated bricks from Bailey Hill yellow clay for the Uganda submerged double pot stove in 2002. Exposing […]
The new Osprey funded book is a compilation of fifty-one updated newsletters, reflecting the current state of knowledge at ARC. Stove experiments fail to improve prototypes as often as they succeed. One of the great things about iterative development (testing effects of single changes in prototypes under the emission hood) is that you learn as […]
ARC started in 1976, almost 50 years ago. In 1982, the original cook stove consultants returned from global travels to Oregon, bought 40 acres of forested land at the end of a road, planted a garden and started talking to Dr. Larry Winiarski, (Oregon State University) learning how to improve combustion and heat transfer efficiency. […]
In 2018, the World Health Organization published the book “Air pollution and child health: prescribing clean air”. The report concludes, “Every day around the world, billions of children are exposed to unsafe levels of air pollution. The result is a global public health emergency.” The WHO suggested “prescriptions” to clean the air and protect health: […]
We experimented at SSM with a “Horizontal TLUD” As seen above, the draft of a Rocket stove can pull woodgas horizontally through made charcoal. The tips of the sticks turn into hot charcoal. Secondary air is pre-heated in the circular annulus before entering the fire in front (or above) of the made charcoal, as in […]
Central Boiler combustion chamber Last week Dean and Travis went to the Hearth, Patio & Barbeque Association Expo in New Orleans to get updated on the latest heating stove technologies and to meet and talk to stove companies. Three days was a short time but we made many friends and learned a lot! The CENTRAL […]
Burning wood slowly (and cleanly) can be a big part of the challenge when improving heating stoves. Air tight, insulated houses do not need big fires to stay warm. If the fire is too large, the house gets hot and folks are opening windows! What firepower is needed to keep a house warm but not […]
Institutional-size stoves like this Lihubesi stove frequently use a sunken pot or pot skirt to increase heat transfer efficiency. While testing the institutional-size Alpha Limited TLUD, ARC staff conducted an experiment to see if a skirt is strictly necessary with a very large pot. A 58cm in diameter pot was heated by the six-inch in […]
Schoolhouse Creek, filled with late winter run off, rushes along next to the Cafeteria building The Aprovecho lab is in a green forest, eight miles east of Cottage Grove, Oregon, a town of ~10,000 people. Working in a forest to design, manufacture and sell clean burning biomass cooking and heating stoves makes sense. Heating and […]