More on Hot Stoves

What a surprise to read this in today's Register Guard:

Efficient stove solution

International visitors attend a workshop in Cottage Grove to see how stoves can help impoverished areas

BY BOB KEEFER

The Register-Guard

Published: Monday, Jan 24, 2011 05:01AM

COTTAGE GROVE — Here’s one way to look at it: The folks at Aprovecho Research Center want to save the world, one small stove at a time.

And, from the looks of things on Sunday, they may be slowly succeeding — with help from the United Nations.

“In Africa and in Asia, in rural areas, the issue of energy is one of the biggest problems,” said Valentine Ndibalema, one of about 20 people who assembled at a former hog-processing plant on the edge of Cottage Grove this weekend for Aprovecho’s 2011 Winter Stove Workshop.

“We need to find a way to reduce consumption. We are quite interested in seeing how things are done here.”

Ndibalema, a Tanzanian, is a senior environmental coordinator for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland.

He came to Cottage Grove last week, as did people from Sudan, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Kenya, to spend five days exploring how to build a better stove. The workshop is being put on for staff from the U.N. World Food Programme.

The word “stove,” by the way, means something quite different here from your typical kitchen range. We are talking about the kind of small wood-burning stoves that are in common use by very poor people throughout the world, whether they live in a remote Latin American village or in a crowded refugee camp in Sudan.

Ndibalema works with displaced persons camps, where people cook using whatever fuels they can scrounge and where having a better stove can make a huge difference.

“There is a growing understanding that there is a suite of issues that need to be addressed that have to do with how people cook their food in the developing world,” explained Tom Skeele, the center’s corporate operations officer.

“This relates to air pollution, indoors and out. To safety — people getting burned, especially kids. To lung disease. To deforestation. In refugee and displaced persons camps, women are going outside the camps to find fuel and they are being raped. If we can increase the effectiveness of stoves, then more time can be put into getting a woman or her children an education. Or getting a job.”

The research center focuses on stove design and construction, creating stoves for single-family use (these are about the size of a five-gallon bucket) or for institutional cooking (think 55-gallon oil drum). Aprovecho has even designed a wood-fired autoclave for sterilizing hospital instruments. A small family stove costs about $14.

Outside next to a small garden, Fred Colgan, who is co-director of Aprovecho’s Institutional Stove Project, put his ungloved hand on the bare metal chimney of a big green stove that was boiling a kettle of water in the open air. (It was Colgan’s meeting with Ndibalema in Rome last year, while on his way back from Nigeria, that brought the U.N. staffers here to Oregon.)

“This doesn’t burn you,” he said. “It’s safe to touch anywhere even while the stove is burning.”

That’s because the stove, which is literally built from a 55-gallon drum, is so efficient that the heat goes into boiling water, not making the outside of the stove hot.

“This stove will boil 30 liters of water in 22 minutes using just 1,200 grams of fuel,” Colgan said proudly.

(For the metrically challenged, that means it will bring about 8 gallons of water to a boil using just about 2.5 pounds of firewood.)

The heat is conserved by, for example, designing the stove to wrap around not only the bottom but also the sides of a 60-liter cooking kettle, so that the stove’s intense heat blasts nearly the entire surface of the kettle. As a result, the institutional stoves are up to 90 percent more efficient than stoves generally in use, Colgan said.

While that big stove burned away in the open air, a smaller, family-style Aprovecho stove was boiling its own smaller pot of water atop a concrete pad inside a closed room.

Amit Singh, an officer with the U.N. World Food Programme in Darfur, was standing right next to the stove, just as a cook might. But he was monitoring the air quality in the room with a variety of sensors.

Despite the unvented stove, the air was tangy, but not choking by any means.

Singh is working with Aprovecho to bring 200 of its institutional stoves to Darfur, paid for by the world food program. “We will give them to the schools there,” he said. “We are feeding kids there when they go to school.”

Another participant in the conference is Habib Iddrisu. He grew up in a small village in Ghana, but came to the United States and married a Eugene woman.

Iddrisu wanted to see about bringing Aprovecho stoves back to Ghana.

“People use open fires to cook on,” he said. “I didn’t realize just how bad that was until I came here. I went back there with my wife and family this summer. We realized how much this stove technology could benefit life in Ghana.”

The conference continues through Wednesday.

Warning: Hot Stove!

Depending on your point of view, the objects in this picture may look really interesting or they may look just the opposite.  But whatever you think about the objects themselves, as is so often the case, the story behind them is interesting, no matter what your point of view.

So let's start with the obvious question.  What are they?  

They're cookstoves.  They're fueled by wood or charcoal and they were developed right here in GroveAtopia at the Aprovecho Research Center.  

Now I'm pretty sure you don't know what the word aprovecho means but oddly enough, there are two places called Aprovecho in GroveAtopia, so it's probably worth taking a moment to at least explain what it means.  Both Aprovechos used to be related, but now they're not.  We'll talk about that in another post.  For now suffice it to say in GroveAtopia we know there is "stove Aprovecho" and "sustainable living Aprovecho."  Clearly we are talking here about "stove Aprovecho."

As for what aprovecho means - don't worry, you aren't alone, because that's the first thing most people ask when you start talking about it - aprovecho means "to make the best use of."  

So what you have in the picture is the main product of "stove Aprovecho."  It's called a StoveTec and it's a low-cost, low-emission cookstove designed for use wherever people do most of their cooking over an open fire.

If you think about it for about a nano-second you realize that quite a lot of the rest of the world cooks over an open flame - sometimes outdoors, sometimes indoors.  But you probably didn't think about it much more than that.  

If you did though, and the people at Aprovecho most certainly did - in great detail for many years - you would realize that cooking over an open flame presents problems.  One is that it's basically not healthy for the people and air they breath - especially if they are cooking indoors.  The other is that it can be hard to find fuel.  Especially if you live in the same place for a long time.  Eventually you run out.

So for the past 29 years, the folks at Aprovecho have been working to solve this problem.  Their solutions keep getting better and better, and as they do they keep getting noticed more and more.  If you clicked on the link to their website you know they have won an award from none other than Prince Charles, been featured in the New Yorker and even made an appearance on Martha Stewart.  

And here's a scoop, tomorrow morning, NPR will be here to do a story on them.  

This is all pretty heady stuff for our little town.  Imagine international notoriety for doing good around the world.   We in GroveAtopia don't have to imagine it though because it's already being done.

Our naked bridge

Imagine what it was like to drive downtown the other day and find our most iconic bridge standing there, right in public, stark naked.   Quite simply, it was a shock.

It wasn't the kind of shock you want the the little children to turn their heads away from, because this was not that kind of nudity.  This was the kind of shock you feel when something utterly familiar has suddenly changed.  In fact you didn't even know just how familiar it was to you until it changed.  Overnight.  Just like that.

This naked little bridge is known as Centennial Bridge because it was constructed in 1997, the year GroveAtopia turned 100.  It is not a "genuine" covered bridge because covered bridge purists like to see the bridges where they originally stood, and preferably still carrying traffic.  But it was constructed from timbers salvaged from two covered bridges that were taken down, so that gives it some genuiness, now doesn't it?

Genuine or not, the Centennial Bridge is probably the most photographed of our bridges because it is right downtown and because it is a pedestrian bridge.  It's smaller than covered bridges that were built for vehicles, and in some ways that makes it even more genuine than its bigger cousins in the surrounding countryside, because nearly everyone sees this bridge every day and most have probably walked across it at least once.  Okay, I just met someone who has lived here all his life and has never walked across it, but I'm sure he's the only one.

So just what is our bridge doing standing there naked in the coldest part of winter?  

Well it's actually good news.  The bridge was looking worse for the wear, so the Lions Club went in one Saturday and took off the siding.  It will be replaced by new siding, and the lights inside and out will be upgraded.  Plus the little window boxes full of flowers that originally hung outside each little window will be returned too.

The whole project is supposed to be completed by the end of February.  

In the meantime here is your chance to see the outside of the bridge's insides.  In case you wanted to know, when you look at the bridge now, what you are seeing are its Howe Trusses.  

And you can still walk across it even though it's stark naked.

The elusive winter egg

We all know that it has been a very long time since you've heard anything from GroveAtopia.  But as you know, that does not mean we have not been here.  We didn't disappear or cease to exist, we just stopped writing about it for what turned out to be quite a while.

I'm going to spare you the promises, vows and commitments you are expecting to hear.  You know the ones where I talk about how I will post more regularly and not let so much time lapse between postings.

But let's be honest.  Let's not set ourselves up for disappointment, self criticism or guilt.  Let's just enjoy what we have right now - another post from our favorite place - GroveAtopia.   Whether we post regularly or not, GroveAtopia can take it.  So let's just jump right in, shall we?

It's winter in GroveAtopia and as if rain, occasional snow, and the particularly menacing sounding freezing fog we experience during this dark season were not enough, we must also endure an egg shortage.

I know, it doesn't sound right, does it?  Why not just go to the store and get a dozen?  The stores have plenty.

But here in GroveAtopia, we do it differently.  We only go to the store to buy eggs as a last resort.  We'd rather get our eggs from our neighbor because in the GroveAtopian countryside chances are our neighbor has chickens and those chickens are not shy about producing plenty of eggs.  In spring, summer and fall that is.  Not in winter.

Before I came to GroveAtopia I didn't know this, and maybe you don't either, but it turns out chickens need a certain amount of light to lay eggs.  So right around about Halloween, the chickens start laying fewer and fewer eggs until by Christmas, finding a farm egg in GroveAtopia can be nearly impossible.

For awhile I could get them at the Old Mill Feed Store.  Then their source stopped laying.  Then I could get them at Scott's farm stand.  Then those chickens succumbed to winter.  Then there were the terrible few weeks where I had to buy them at the store.  Let's not dwell on that difficult time.

Lately I've been able to get them at Farmhand Feed.  You are limited to one dozen per week - but last week I got lucky and got a dozen and a half.   Jackpot!  I'm so happy to find a reliable source of winter eggs I'm not even going to ask Mary, who runs Farmhand Feed, where she gets them.

It may not be convenient, but when you think about it, maybe that's how it should be.  When you eat an egg, you should think about the chicken, or if you don't know the chicken well enough to think about it, at least think about the fact that a chicken was involved.  Your GroveAtopian farm egg may not come from a chicken you know personally, but someone you know probably does.

So when I have my dozen winter eggs in my refrigerator, I feel happy.  And if I have enough to hard-boil, well that's just a bonus.

What a contrast to the summer months, when there is plenty of light and there are plenty of eggs.  So many in fact that I had dozens stacked in the refrigerator.  But until those days return, I'll cherish my elusive winter eggs.