‘Three-stoves’ Mike

So we’ve arrived at session eight of the course. This is the final session. So I thought we’d do things a bit differently. Several of my academic colleagues are still here. And they’re out in the garden having a bit of a barbecue. I’m not going to go out and join them.

Gosh, hello, Mike. You appear to have three stoves on the go, do you? Yes, I’ve got three stoves. I’ve got two rocket stoves and one fireless cooker, fuelless cooker. Could you tell me a bit about them please? The ones here and then the one at the end are rocket stoves. They’re used by people in many developing countries. And they’re more efficient than cooking on an open fire, a three-stone fire. An open fire might be 5%-10% efficient. These are maybe 20%, 30% percent efficient. They work, you can see here, feed in the wood at the bottom here. And then you feed it into the stove there.

This time, we’ve put a hot plate on it so we can cook off some food at like a barbecue. The one at the end is even more simple. It’s just a pipe with some fins going up it to keep the stove stable and to keep the cook pot on top stable there as well. And again, that’s a nice way of– And what are you cooking on top of that one? Well, come and have a look.

So in this one, I’ve got some vegetable chilli with some lentils, some locally-sourced vegetables from the co-op there. And then this one? And this one, this is my fireless cooker. So the idea is if you’re cooking something like rice, you can bring it up to the boil. And then all it really needs to do is simmer to cook. So rather than leaving it on a stove, or if you’re at home leaving it on your gas hob, you can put it in a cooker like this one. So here we have a cardboard box. I’ve got an old cushion pad on the top. There’s my pan of rice. We’ve actually cooked it already. So it’s just keeping warm.

You can see the heat rising off it there. And I’ll take the rest out so you can see what’s in it. So we’ve got an old shirt there just to keep the newspaper off. We’ve got some shredded paper there to provide some thermal insulation so the rice will keep nice and warm and ready to eat. So it’s not that this one doesn’t need any energy, it just reduces the need for energy. That’s right. So you just get it cooked on your stove, or your bring it up to temperature. And then you finish off the cooking by putting it in this nicely insulated box there. Well, thanks, Mike. I hope the food tastes good, too.

I’m going to go and have a word with Pete.