What’s Cooking at Aprovecho

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A Four-Nation Design Collaboration

On their recent trip to SSM in Shengzhou, China, Nordica and Jaden were reminded that many minds are always better than one. SSM were gracious hosts to ARC, OffgridSun from Italy, and Tango Energy from Tanzania for a week. Together, they designed a stove for Tanzania that addressed cooks’ needs, had improved performance, and could be jointly manufactured at SSM and Tango Energy. Meeting in person turned a several-month-long process of emails and phone calls into a streamlined week of design. Maybe when it comes to stove design, there is no such thing as too many cooks in the kitchen.

ETHOS 2026

The ARC team attended another successful ETHOS conference, this year in Portland, Oregon. Sam and Dean hosted Stoves 101, providing a valuable crash course in cookstove design. We also presented on the effects of forced air in stoves, LEMS testing around the world, RTKC capacity building, and much more. ETHOS is always a great time for us to reflect on the work we did and what we learned throughout the year. It’s also wonderful to see what everyone else is working on.

LEMS Around the World: Now in Burundi

Our mission to ensure everywhere has the capability to perform stove emission testing continues. Sam traveled to Burundi where he set up a LEMS and trained (in French) a team at the Laboratoire de Biomasse et de Cuisson Propre et Économe/Université du Burundi. Over 10 ISO tests on various stove types were run with the lab team as well as lab CCTs, a vital test to measure stove performance while performing a cooking task. ARC is now working to add CCT capabilities to their open-source data processing software.

Working in another language takes patience but it allows ARC to work in cross-cultural settings where lab testing, stove design, and market testing come together.


Visiting SSM

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New SSM Health/Climate Biomass Heating Stove Buildings

Here is a video I made last week, introducing some of the the new things I saw on my visit to Shengzhou Stove Manufacturer (SSM). I keep on saying in the video (Sorry!) how much I admire Mr. and Mrs. Shen. Mr. Shen is a great engineer who has built the new buildings, installed the machines, and taken the ideas that Dr. Winiarski brought to him and manufactured over five million durable, affordable Rocket stoves. Mrs. Shen runs the business, does HR, sells the stoves, etc. 

An amazing combination! Daughter, Kristina and nephew Chenkai, are being trained to assist the business. You’ll meet the younger generation in the video. Kristina went to the University of Oregon and is now a Vice President at SSM. Chenkai leads a team selling stoves out of his offices in Shenzen.

I walked around new buildings, tested clean burning stoves (including the Jet-Flame and forced draft TLUD) and saw a new wing being built (above) with huge machines to make health/climate biomass heating stoves, a new venture. Since 1976, Aprovecho has helped approximately one hundred stove projects, with SSM becoming the most commercially successful, rolling profits into expanding capacity.

What a joy to visit!

SSM manufactured rocket stoves with fires burning in them

Durability Testing at SSM

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SSM manufactured rocket stoves with fires burning in them
Year-long durability testing with real fires

I just returned to the Oregon lab from a two-week visit to Shengzhou Stove Manufacturer. The next few newsletters will be about SSM and progress made. There’s a lot to talk about! SSM has sold over 5 million stoves and the factory is a wonderful place to visit. 

SSM started testing stoves for durability twenty-four hours a day (three eight hour shifts at a nearby farming community) three years ago. The farmers keep fires going in eight SSM stoves and the tests continue for one year of each stove. That’s 8, 860 hours.

It’s great that SSM has been doing long term, real life testing of their stoves. Previously, tests in a kiln with wet, salted pieces of metal resulted in confusing estimates of durability. In 2017, M.P. Brady and T.J. Theiss shocked the stove world by showing that in a wet, salty, hot kiln even very expensive metals were not long lasting. (Energy for Sustainable Development 37 (2017) 20–32, “Alloy Corrosion Considerations in Low-Cost, Clean Biomass Cookstoves for the Developing World”, Michael P. Brady, et al.).

The SSM testing is being written up. It seems to show much longer durability of various combustion chamber metals when real fires are used. Full details to follow.