[Stoves] EWB Princeton in Huamanzana

Sat Aug 4 15:15:22 EDT 2007

Thanks Tom,

  I don´t want to interfere with the smooth functioning of the discussion list so only the fewest most general and most universally useful questions may be sent in the future (and direct emails to me can help prevent noise on the list), but this is turning out to be a GREAT lesson in using local materials.  I was asked to specify the design and provide a stove bill of materials before I came, but a local design is best, and it should be created around local materials.  It turns out that Peru is replete with extruded hollow bricks of many shapes and sizes that we can arrange into multiple stove designs with very few parts, and can contemplate using these to make chimneys (instead of iron - scraps or making round/square from sheet) in the near future.  Their only issue is that they are thin walled, so can´t take a blow if used wrong.  We sem to be limited to only ash as an insulation filler choice, and luckily don´t seem to need to make insulative brick yet (no kilns are very
 local).

  And the availability of a tiny refractory brick maker may be a boon as well if the baldosa here (really only flimsy commercial glazed indoor floor tile is available) will not work; he usually makes the cylindrical insulation pieces that insulate the beehive coal stoves street cafes use, and we have one of these for a possible combustion chamber.  When we specify our custom pieces tomorrow he will have these ready in just 5 days (but he is many hours away - we are setting up systems so that vendors can deliver parts just in time to buses or intermediary people, then these make their way to us JIT; important since the last leg is through sand and the tiny minivan cannot carry much on its irregular visits to Huamanzana) and we can get the price down considerably on these.

  Work with the blacksmith in Chao is tricky since we are specifying unfamiliar objects, such as custom ¨wood knives¨(old fashioned froes, to help the women split wood finer than the tree trunks that they are using now) and the grates on legs.  He has a tendency to make assumptions and changes that are not to our benefit, and no one here works to a schedule.  Para mi, no muy importante.

  And beautiful river stones are everywhere but are almost never used for anything!  So I have created a set of chisels and similar tools for occasionally shaping a stone or two when needed.  I want to consider stone for back walls and other non-essential parts, and maybe for chimney supports.  But also we will demonstrate big cylinders for communal trash burning containers, to replace the half burnt smoldering piles scattered around - but we are not here to make cultural changes so we go slowly.  If I use a grate in these and add some bottom air holes I hope to get better combustion, until we can develop better quasi gasifiers (and a way to make non-woody biomass charcoal... it would be my dream to extrude this with the brick presses, give the right binder and other adulterants).  I spend my free time in towns wandering the streets to get an idea of who and what is avaiable - I just need to get to the trash dumps (equally valuable to engineers and archaeologists
 apparently) to see what is thrown away and my life will be complete!  I assume some biomass will be in them, particularly corn and sugarcane parts.

  Best from all of us here,

  Charlie

Tom Miles <tmiles at trmiles.com> wrote:
  Charlie,

This is a great time to support the EWB Huamanzana effort. I'm sure that
folks will pitch in. It sounds like you've give up or at least modified the
Inkawasi approach. 

Best regards to Shannon and the others. 

Kind regards,

Tom miles

-----Original Message-----
From: stoves-bounces at listserv.repp.org
[mailto:stoves-bounces at listserv.repp.org] On Behalf Of Charlie Sellers
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 9:14 AM
To: 'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'
Subject: [Stoves] EWB Princeton in Huamanzana

Hello everyone, and now I am REALLY grateful for all of your postings to the
web over the years - I can access all of your expereinces easily, even from
almost remote places in Peru! The EWB Princeton student project building
chimney stoves is in a little village past electricity, a few hours from
Trujillo Peru. It has 35 homes and is in a river valley in the foothills of
the Andes - everything is just sand, stones, and ancient mountains with no
vegetation - it only rains every 12 to 15 years here, and this winter there
is just a trickle of water that is diverted for irrigation. Huamanzana has
almost no technology except for the small solar electricity system intalled
by these engineers in the past - a few public place lights and a battery
charging system for the batteries they use in the LED lanterns that each
house was issued (it costs them $.30 USD every 2 weeks).

We are building a custom plancha chimney stove for each household,
basically based on the ONIL concept (though we have no plans for it or
similar), since the submerged pot design did not work well last year (leaks,
and too many different pot sizes). Right now they cook in a trench between
bricks, on a platform that the guinea pigs live beneath, and the copius
smoke exits through the holey walls and roof (so the IAP issues are not as
bad as I feared). As usual they balance several pots at a time on the
bricks, and feed scarce wood the size of your arms into the space too
quickly.

They will find the diminished response time, efficiency, fire visibility,
and water boiling time of the future stoves to be dreadful, but we will make
the stoves (sized to each cook) attractive to compensate. I hope.

No time for too many details here, but I would like to mention a few
things that I could use a bit of help on:
- ideas on the use of stone for construction, since they only use adobe
now
- stone or metal SIMPLE burners for burning their trash completely (same
for making charcoal from biomass)
- using biomass in a plancha stove, to save trees

I only get email every few days in a small town a few hours away so send
only a few (with a link or two - your time is valuable, and mine very
scarce) to me at csellers42 at yahoo.com, as well as too the list if it might
be of interest to all. Just a few emails with key information would be
great, to use the few materials I have (just bricks, floor tile, stone,
cement, sand, some custom refractory brick luckily, and a bad blacksmith
using scrap iron) to make the most difference.

http://huamanzana.blogspot.com/

Charlie Sellers

Charlie

http://improvedstoves.blogspot.com/ - just R&D related to fuel efficient
biomass stove issues
http://travelswithcharlie.blogspot.com/ - most recent travel posts
http://new.photos.yahoo.com/csellers42/ - travel photos, of everywhere -
click on the country albumns on the left
http://huiplesofguatemala.blogspot.com/ - my textile project in Guatemala -
what colors!
http://travelswithcharlie2.blogspot.com/ - older travel posts, including
Nepal travelogue 
http://ewbappropriatetechnology.blogspot.com/ - just posts for the ATDT of
the EWB-SFP; AT for developing countries

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http://improvedstoves.blogspot.com/ - just R&D related to fuel efficient biomass stove issues
  http://travelswithcharlie.blogspot.com/ - most recent travel posts
http://new.photos.yahoo.com/csellers42/ - travel photos, of everywhere - click on the country albumns on the left
http://huiplesofguatemala.blogspot.com/ - my textile project in Guatemala - what colors!
http://travelswithcharlie2.blogspot.com/ - older travel posts, including Nepal travelogue 
http://ewbappropriatetechnology.blogspot.com/ - just posts for the ATDT of the EWB-SFP; AT for developing countries

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