Fuel Efficient Stoves and Changing Habits

Way back when I arrived in my site and spent many hours of many days walking around the campo getting to know everyone and what type of work I might do here. It became clear quite quickly that my fellow community members were expecting a fuel-efficient stove project since a volunteer living in my site previously was unable to build stoves for the people where I lived. 100% of the people in my community cook over a ‘traditional fogon’ or an open fire with the pot resting on three rocks. Convincing community members of the benefits is not hard.  A stove with a chimney can reduce the negative health affects from daily smoke inhalation, as well as make cooking a more pleasant experience. The walls of the outdoor kitchens where women cook are covered with a thick layer of black soot, evidence left from years of an unbearably smoky cooking environment. A more efficient stove will also lower the amount of time needed to collect wood, and cutting down fewer trees for firewood is an obvious environmental benefit.  Finally, women place a very high value on clean, new, pretty objects in the home and many stove models are rather attractive in the kitchen setting. Needless to say, stoves are very popular and seem to be a wonderful project to undertake as a volunteer.

So life continues, and after organizing people in my community and gauging interest I submitted the grant and waited for about a year to get the funds from USAID. Now I have the money and am still sitting like a duck because I haven’t yet decided which stove model to build. There have been hundreds of volunteers who have built stoves before me with varying success in this country; but we seem to be at a crossroads of stove model evolution. From what I understand, the most common and proven model up to this point is made out of very large ceramic pieces that connect together with tubes on the inside leading out to a chimney.

As you can see these pieces are rather large and uncomfortable for packing tightly. I imagine the 14- hour trip from my site, up to the one place in the country where they are made and back, to be a test of the driver’s patience, the truck’s agility, the current condition of all the back roads: rather risky variables. As catholic roots dictate here, this voyage shall be made only if god is willing…

After experiencing problems with transport, and the relatively high cost of the parts, past volunteers experimented with a different stove design, called ‘the Rocket’. They successfully built a working stove made from materials available anywhere in the country thus decreasing materials and transportation costs dramatically. While the science of the ‘rocket’ design has been used in stove models around the world some specific materials were chosen more for their availability rather than their proven durability. Mainly, the inside of stove has burn chambers, and burners  made of cement. Cement is not particularly heat tolerant and since small-scale, long-term testing was not completed, many of the stoves built by excited, penny pinching Peace Corps volunteers are now quite literally falling apart.

Despite the fact the Dominican Republic rocket stove failed on some fronts, the volunteers designing it drew attention to the need for a stove model that is more cost-efficient and transportable to all sites in the country. This fueled the interest of a group of volunteers in the Appropriate Technology sector to dedicate their time and expertise to develop a stove that was cheap, easy to transport, and burned efficiently. The stove, currently labeled ‘AT-Duncan model’, after its creators, is currently undergoing a testing process. There are about 10 volunteers with two stoves in their sites monitoring the proper use of stove, and watching to see how it holds up. In August we spent some time at a workshop learning how to build the stove, and then in September and October travelled around to each other’s sites to make sure we build the test-stoves properly.

These photos show some friendly volunteers and some young adults in my community helping out with making the molds for the walls of the stove. The clay covered pieces are the inside chambers of the stove covered with a mortar mix we use to stick all of the pieces together.

This is my trusty neighbor, Jose, who is learning how to build the stoves so he can be the head mason in the project and earn some money building in the future. He is definitely a jack-of-all trades and I look forward to continue working with him. We are hoping to form a team with some high school-aged to help spread the work load and stove know-how throughout generations and parts of the community.

I hope to be able to do a full-scale stove project in my site, as I feel very strongly about the benefits of the project – but it is still a question of time as we wait to see how these new ‘Duncan-AT’ stoves turn out.  The test stove we built in my site is at my neighbor’s house. She has been using it every day without too much trouble, but we are still working on changing some old habits that are hard to kick. For example, the stove is designed to work with small pieces of wood so air can flow through the inner chambers and carry heat to both burners. Women here use big pieces of wood that make a visibly larger fire but block the airflow. Other small habits that several volunteers have found difficult to change include: learning how to cook both rice and beans at the same time utilizing both burners; using dry and properly cut firewood;  using firewood instead of charcoal…etc, etc.  Once we decide on which structural model is appropriate for the stove project the next challenge will be teaching the proper use and care of the stove as we encourage women to change their art of cooking that has been the same for generations.