A rat proof box When Dr. Larry Winiarski and I lived for a season at Rancho San Nicolas in Baja California Sur, Mexico we wanted to be helpful. We built cook stoves, solar cookers and other delightful inventions that we found interesting. But Larry was an insightful fellow and he started to listen to folks […]
Capacity Building with CSIR Over the past 3 years, thanks to three grants from Fire Capital, Aprovecho has been working with CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) in Ghana to expand their lab capacity. We have focused on teaching stove design principles through co-developing a stove retrofit for boarding schools in Ghana. During the […]
Concentrator disk/chimney in a TLUD When I asked Google AI, “Is flow more laminar in a smaller diameter tube?” it immediately responded: “Yes, thanks for asking! A smaller diameter tube can promote more laminar flow for a given flow rate. This is because reducing the diameter of a tube increases the Reynolds number, which is a dimensionless quantity […]
Photo from TREEAID on Flickr Looking at the photo it is easy to imagine why field-testing is needed to show whether an intervention is actually saving fuel. Real life is complicated and is not replicated in a lab. The use of a Water Boiling Test to determine if new stoves are saving fuel has historically […]
In my opinion, the WBT* cannot be used, especially in the lab, to improve a biomass cook stove because all of the important field variables are not represented. A successful cook stove needs to be evolved from field tests, as we did in Southern India for the Shell Foundation. Cooks in eighteen villages kept on […]
Image from Dr. Paul Anderson’s Introduction to TChar (TLUD) Stoves for Haiti The size of the hole in the middle of the flat plate, usually round, that seals the top of the combustor in a TLUD stove has important functions. The flat plate forces air jets/flame to travel horizontally in an attempt to completely cover […]
Cooking outdoors, making hot fires, burning the tips of sticks to use less wood and breathe less smoke (photo: Clean Cooking Alliance) In 2003, Aprovecho was hired by The Shell Foundation to develop a Rocket stove in Southern India. We found a wonderful co-op of potters that was selling two-pot burnished $4 ceramic stoves with […]
Sometimes it’s too cloudy for solar drying and a wood-fired dehydrator can help with large scale food preservation. In 2002, Dr. Larry Winiarsk helped farmers in the wet mountainous region of Nicaragua to design and build a prototype wood fired dryer for cacao beans. The ARC publication “The Winiarski Wood Fired Agricultural Food Dryer,” details […]
The LEMS in Ethiopia In March, Jaden traveled to Ethiopia to assist in the installation of the LEMS and train lab technicians on ISO testing for cookstoves. 15 trainees from all over the country attended the training. The LEMS was procured by SNV and their sponsors and was given to Ethiopia’s Department of Water and […]
One of the biggest mistakes I have made was thinking that I could predict what stove would sell in a market. If only I had always followed Sam Baldwin’s advice and done market testing before manufacturing! In Southern India, as part of the 2003-6 Shell Foundation project, we had outspoken distributors who yelled in meetings […]