[Stoves] Heating unit or cooking stove INSIDE a home?

[IPC]

Dear Tom

It's not a question of imposing US standards on the poor - it's a much
deeper question than that.  We have measured CO concentrations inside homes
of over 1500ppm. At that level, it raises major physiological questions
about how people adapt to such levels (US EPA is 50ppm for 1h, and we are
talking 8h+ exposure here).  Worse, it raises questions about brain
development in infants growing under such conditions. You probably know that
CO binds to the haemoglobin in blood, and therefore reduces the
oxygen-carrying ability of the blood.  At 1500ppm CO, the oxygen levels in
blood are something like you would experience at 20 000feet above sea level.

And, of course, because there is no control, you can exceed 1500ppm.  We
haven't measured any, but we have observed the effects.  Tracking death
notices in Soweto newspapers about 15 years ago, we saw an increase in the
overnight deaths of whole families during winter.  There would typically be
3-4 families, all of whom perished in a single night, every week.  Their
deaths would merely be recorded as "accidental" and lost among the data of
100's of other accidental deaths. The only reasonable explanation of a whole
family dying in his way is asphyxiation.

So we can't treat CO lightly - it is a killer.

Hope that helps.

Philip Lloyd
Energy Research Centre
University of Cape Town
Private Bag Rondebosch 7701
South Africa
Tel +27 (0)21 650 3896
Fax +27 (0)21 650 2830
 





  

-----Original Message-----
From: stoves-bounces at listserv.repp.org
[mailto:stoves-bounces at listserv.repp.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Reed
Sent: 10 May 2008 04:15
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Heating unit or cooking stove INSIDE a home?

Dear Andrew and all Stovers:

There is a win-win solution.   All indoor cooking should have at least a 
natural draft hood to take the hot cooking gases, greases and any stove
emissions etc. up and out. This kills two birds with one stone - stove
emissions and cooking emissions. 

CO is very toxic particularly because it is odorless.  However, smokers
regularly breath smoke containing > 20 ppm.

The current Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) permissible
exposure limit (PEL) for carbon monoxide is 50 parts per million (ppm) parts
of air (55 milligrams per cubic meter (mg/m(3))) as an 8-hour time-weighted
average (TWA) concentration [29 CFR Table Z-1]. See

*http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/healthguidelines/carbonmonoxide/recognition.html*

Too much worry about imposing US standards on people with no means to meet
them imposes starvation on the poor. 

TOM REED        BEF


andrew wrote:
> On Thursday 08 May 2008 19:23, Paul S. Anderson wrote:
>   
>> Dick has asked about a cooking or heating stove INSIDE his residence.  
>> If a cookstove was built from scratch or even altered from an 
>> existing stove, would it even be allowed inside of an American 
>> residence?  What about the safety checks and permits and insurance 
>> questions?  These are serious restrictions!!  Anyone have specific 
>> info on this??
>>     
>
> I cannot help regarding American legal restrictions but am wary that 
> discussion of specifics of American law is beyond the scope of this 
> list.
>
> What would be relevant to cooking and heating stoves is what any such 
> laws aim to do, with regard to safety of people using the sort of 
> devices we discuss.
>
> The simple fact may be that less developed economies cannot yet afford 
> the overhead of legislation, yet, but there's no reason we should not 
> strive to provide them with the same levels of safety we assume for 
> ourselves.
>
> AJH
>
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