The CleanCook
The CleanCook stove was selected by Project Gaia for all its projects because Gaia believes that this stove is the best alcohol stove available on the market at the present time. The stove is comprised of a metal body (this example is made from stainless steel) with a burner and pot-stand. The stove body is around 60cm square, with a height around 14cm. The fuel tank will hold around 1.2 liters of alcohol fuel, which will burn for around four to five hours at maximum heat. A two-burner model is available.
A perfect stove for the 21st century should burn cleanly and safely, and cook food quickly. The fuel should be affordable, reduce deforestation, and produce only low levels of greenhouse gases. Project Gaia has adopted the CleanCook stove for its projects as it possesses all of these attributes. Pilot studies in Ethiopia, Brazil and Nigeria show that the CleanCook stove is well liked and well used.
Safety No matter how beneficial a stove may be, it won’t be effective unless its owner wants to use it and enjoys using it.
The stove is stable, and the fuel is safely stored in a non-spill fuel tank. Gaia’s work in Ethiopia has shown that women value the safety of the alcohol-fueled stove as much as they value the clean kitchens that these stoves make possible. The fuel tanks hold the ethanol in a special adsorptive fiber so that it cannot spill. The tanks are not pressurized so they will not flare and cannot be made to explode. The fuel tank is inserted from underneath the stove, so it has to be removed to fill. This makes the stove very safe as it cannot be filled whilst the stove is alight. The stove uses either ethanol or methanol. Recent laboratory safety tests showed that the CleanCook is ‘very safe,’ scoring 39 out of 40 points (based on a protocol Nathan Johnson of Iowa State University as a Master’s Thesis and employed by the Aprovecho Research Center).
The CleanCook fulfills that need.
Monitoring Smoke
The CleanCook has been monitored for pollutants in both the laboratory and in a small household survey. Laboratory tests showed that it had:
• an average CO/CO2 ratio of 4% at high power and 5% at low power
• particle emissions were negligible in all tests
• methane emissions can be highly variable and difficult to measure; methane / CO2 ratio gas chromatograph tests recorded a range of values from 0.02% to 0.35%
Stove life • The stoves have been used under arduous conditions in refugee camps since 2005, and are still working fine.
Avoids deforestation • The CleanCook stove can use ethanol, methanol or a mix of both. These fuels can be made from wastes. For example, in Ethiopia, Gaia uses the waste from sugar production and Nigeria is looking to use the gases that are otherwise flared off in oil exploration.
Additional documentation
• The CleanCook Prospectus (PDF)
• A CleanCook brochure (PDF)