Now that we have our materials and measures figured out, we add water to the clay, let it sit for 10 minutes or so (drink some tea) and mix it, then add the ash and have a final product. Even the ash has some stray bits of charcoal still in it. There will also be stray leaves or grass but it’s holding up well. We’re on a roll now with two different crews of locals making a stove every 3 days. 1 ½ rice bags of ash and 1 ½ rice bags of clay make a core from 10 tomato sauce cans, a square form for the core, and a small drum that has been slit down the side and is held together with banding wire as a form for the riser; the forms totally reusable (aside from the cans). The guys have taken several orders for stoves now and are building quickly. Totally awesome. It’s like the cans and the drum are meant to make rockets because they are the perfect size. Next week the crew is going to another village and planning to build a stove there, and they also have a request for a stove from way up north from a guy who was visiting.
Here is what has turned into our basic stove for the people here:
Probably not the best picture but you get the idea. That bigger pot actually fits the well on the right and there is another smaller diameter but deeper pot that fits the left hole directly above the heat riser. This is a can stove as described as above, with mud blocks forming the side walls, cemented with clay/sand. It was dug into the ground about 15cm because the women like to sit low when they cook. You can see how the kitchen there is pretty primitive and the walls are smoked out from decades of open fires.
I met Peace Corps volunteer from the other side of the country deep in the bush and he is pretty stoked about the stoves too. He’s a medical worker and definitely seeing the effects of life-long open fire cooking on the lungs of the people in his village. He has even less access to materials than we do but pretty optimistic that something can work.
There’s a few of us still working on the beast. We had the massive oven built and I jumped the gun on letting it dry properly and it collapsed on us. Upon further inspection, the failure was actually the base supporting the oven. The cob was applied vertically onto the heatriser instead of packing layers horizontally and building up. That area slumped and the oven went with it. Oh well, that’s the beauty of building with earth- we’ll put it back up tomorrow.
"Knowledge is power. Arm yourself."