Entries by Kim Still

New on the Website! Improving Biomass Stoves, 2025

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 […]

Aprovecho Research Center, 2025

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.  […]

Building Blocks to Health

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: […]

Wood Heating: Heating Design Load

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 […]

An Easier Institutional Stove?

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 […]

Working in a Forest

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 […]

Secondary Air Injection

S Dr. Reed’s Alpha Limited stoves Lefebvre, Vanormelingen, and Udesen examined secondary air jets air in cylindrical TLUD combustion chambers and described the most successful patterns and penetration depths. They reported that air jet penetration lengths approaching the middle of flame in a cylindrical combustion chamber resulted in a maximum reduction of PM2.5. An increase […]

Wow! Tom Reed Forced Draft TLUDs are great!

The Tom Reed Alpha Limited Forced Draft TLUD stoves (India) The six-inch and four-inch in diameter FD-TLUD stoves are powered by two AA batteries and are well known to be inexpensive and clean burning. The smaller stove was the “high combustion efficiency” stove used in a 2015 Round Robin test series at Regional Testing and […]