[Stoves] Cooking fuel equivalents

[AJH]

On Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:25:01 -0500, Sharon Gordon wrote:

>Does anyone know of a table where I could find information on how to figure out how much of one cooking fuel equals another?

I'm sure another subscriber will has a link to such a table but just
in case I'll try to make a few points:
>
>Say you have one kilogram of hardwood.  

If we can assume it's reasonably dry then it's gross lower heating
value ( the bit you can use) will be around 15MJ, this is just over
4kWhr(t) of heat. With a simple stove we might expect to deliver
1kWhr(t) into a pot.

>What would be an equivalent amount of:
>
>minutes of low/med/high usage of one burner on an electric stove top

I don't know what the heat transfer efficiency of an electric stove
top might be, best case would be a 1kW(e) kettle which will have 100%
efficiency in heating the water, so you could run this for an hour.

>minutes of usage of an electric oven at a certain temperature

Once my oven is up to temperature (150C) with nothing in it it uses
500W but if something is cooking it normally means steam is being
given off, so the power consumption goes up.

>minutes of low/med/high usage of a gas burner

In general the gas burner will be nearer to the wood stove than an
electric stove simply because it requires a flow of gas and air, the
combustion products from this leave the stove at a high temperature
and hence become waste heat, detracting from efficiency.

AJH