Talk:Smokeless and wood conserving stoves

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[edit] Hard data?

Big claims are made on some sites, e.g.:

"Wood-conserving stove construction has proved highly popular among participants, for example. Reducing the average amount of wood required for cooking by 50%, each stove saves ten trees per year from being cut for firewood. Additionally, the stoves' chimneys divert damaging smoke away from the women and children who would otherwise suffer lung and eye damage from an open fire in the home. Stove construction, at about US$25 per unit, presents a feasible opportunity for participants to conserve resources and reap the benefits. " - http://www.sustainableharvest.org/country_programs.cfm, re Latin American programs

But Rethinking the Latin American Cookstove is more critical. Most sites are more enthusiastic than critical, so it would be good to have some hard data as to how well they really work. (Enthusiasm's great, but it's not enough on its own.) --Singkong2005 01:58, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

It seems some work is being done on testing and improving stoves: see this blog post on the Aprovecho Biomass Stove Camp 2006 --Singkong2005 20 September 2006

[edit] Proposing that Cook stove be merged into this article

Cook stove and Smokeless and wood conserving stoves are mostly about the same subject, so I've proposed a merge. A couple of issues have to be resolved though:

1. The way Cook stove starts off, it seems to be about any kind of biomass-fueled stove, both the improved types and the inefficient, smoky ones. And the definition of cookstove in Webster is "a stove for cooking," which is far more general. Perhaps material on the traditional stoves (the simple, smokey, unimproved ones) should be placed at Biomass cook stove or Traditional stove?
2. What is the best name? When I created Smokeless and wood conserving stoves I was trying to cover the two related terms I had encountered (smokeless stoves and wood conserving stoves) which described the same or similar technologies. --Singkong2005 ^talk 03:56, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I would hold with the name “Cook stove” as it is the more common name used in development work. Someone looking in Wikipedia for information concerning cook stoves, improved or simple would most likely use this term. Also I would not split the traditional cook stoves from the improved cook stoves, I would keep the two together in the same article; it is hard to discus improved cook stoves without talking about traditional ones and how the two differ. Also a lot of proponents of improved cook stoves use a fair amount of hyperbole when discusing their favorite stove. Keeping the two together keeps the playing field level. Brimba 20:25, 1 October 2006 (UTC)