LE CONTOD ROCKET STOVE !

Le Philippin est extrêmement inventif et ingénieux.

C’est souvent le manque de moyens financiers qui l’oblige à innover, c’est parfois un peu farfelu, d’autres fois c’est tout simplement génial.

ILOILO CITY — The misery of typhoon victims has encouraged a Filipino development worker to share a stove innovation that can be built in less than two hours with minimal skills and tools and uses twigs and branches which the affected families can collect from debris.

Called the Contod Rocket Stove,  the stove can be made out of tin metal sheets such as old metal roof (yero), 30 liters carbide canisters or even biscuit container of equivalent size plus two pieces of one-liter tin cans, (Del Monte pineapple cans are of the right size). It will also require clay and other biomass materials such as rice husks and coco fiber (bunot ng niyog) for the insulating layer.

Although very simple and rugged in construction, this stove is very powerful and highly efficient. Compared to a three stone open stove, it uses two sticks of wood instead of seven and can be fed with coco shells broken into bits, palm fronds (palapa ng niyog), grass sticks, bamboo slats, dried buko chips, rice straw tightly twisted together,  among many other possibilities. It burns off smoke and other combustible gases and can be used even in windy areas.  With its features of speed in construction and higher efficiency, the stove can help reduce the burden on the affected families in cooking and gathering fuel.

 Jed Guinto and his stove truck at his workshop at Brgy. Calasgasan, Daet, Camarines Norte …The Contod Rocket Stove is an innovation from the basic design of the rocket stove by Dr. Larry Winiarski of the Aprovecho Institute in Oregon. For this model, development worker Joshua "Jed" B. Guinto, used old metal roof with clay, soil and rice husk as the insulating layer.

He says that although the stove is not fired in the kiln, it can be immediately used as soon as it is done. With clay as the insulating layer, the continuous use of the Contod Rocket Stove will somehow harden the insulating clay layer; thus, extends the usable life of the stove.

The stove was named after a sitio of Brgy. Guinacutan of the town of Vinzons, the birthplace of Guinto in Camarines Norte where the stove was first conceived in 2008.This is in response to the floods of his own province brought about by the tail end of the cold front.

A Fellow of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program, Guinto studied his MS Management of Agro-Ecological Knowledge and Social Change (MAKs)  in Wageningen University from 2006 to 2008 at the Netherlands and has since then continued to improve on his project. His master's thesis entitled "Realistic Evaluation of Stove Design Process" opened doors for him to be able to design stoves that are fuel efficient and pro-poor.

While clay mixed with rice husk and coco fiber is the ideal insulating material inside the stove body, Guinto says flood victims can use any kind of soil without any mix.

The Contod Rocket Stove was conceived on Nov. 29, 2008 in a time of heavy rains and floods at the province of Camarines Norte as Guinto's voluntary effort. The project received financial support from the Sunday mass collection of the parishioners of the Inter- Church Faith (ICF) and the Student Chaplaincy Association of Wageningen at the Netherlands.

 Jed Guinto teaching people on how to make the stove at Brgy. San Isidro, Daet January 2009"The efficiency of the rocket stove comes from the right combination of fuel, air and heat. It is important that the fuel are small and air is flowing freely beneath them. It is only partly pushed to the burner chamber so as not to create too much smoke. Smoke from the fuel is a powerful gas and should not be wasted. The long fuel shelf preheats the incoming fuel and air. 

The high chimney creates the draft and pulls up fresh air and at the same time burn the smoke without losing heat because of the insulating effect of the clay/soil-rice hull mix. The extra high skirt protects the heat from being blown off. The hot skirt serves to dry the next fuel stick," says Guinto.

"The Contod Rocket Stove hopes to enable poor families respond to the fuel crisis in times of calamities and similar disasters and what we want is to produce stove artisans who can create stoves out of local resources, knowledge and skills," says Guinto, a 1987 BS Agricultural Economics graduate of UP at Los Baños.

"What I have is very much a micro enterprise which can produce an average of 10 stoves per month. I built this project out of my meager income," says Guinto.

Guinto says the Contod Rocket Stove is not copyrighted because a huge part of the design comes from an "open source community" such as the worldwide web particularly that of Dr. Winiarski's stove design principles and techniques.  

He adds that in the case of the response to disasters, the sharing of the stove technology is in the context of an emergency response, and not to sell stoves. Thus, Guinto says he is giving away the technology to the affected families.

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