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 […]
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 […]