When we look at a cook stove at Burn Design Lab, the first considerations that come to mind are health impacts and thermal performance: how much does the stove pollute, and how much fuel does it take to cook a meal? 

It turns out, however, that those factors aren’t the top priority for buyers. Instead, many studies have shown that buyers value the stove’s usability and convenience as much if not more than the usual metrics applied in the engineering community. Largely as a result, long-term sustainable adoption of clean cookstove solutions has proven to be one of the industry’s greatest challenges.

Paradoxically, of course, the two are connected. A stove that is enticing to buyers and culturally relevant will be adopted more completely by prospective users, and therefore reduce indoor air pollution and fuel demand for more households. 

In light of these considerations, Burn Design Lab has begun to tackle one of the principal issues of usability: the convenience or hassle of tending the fire. Although they have numerous other disadvantages, traditional open fires typically require less user attention than improved cookstoves, making it harder to convince users to upgrade. In an attempt to address this reality, we are beginning to explore how adding tunnels of various lengths to the fuel feeding opening of our own stick-fed rocket stove might affect how often it needs tending. It occurred to us that it might have a beneficial effect on the fuel efficiency as well. With any luck, we will devise new design elements that will make the stove more user-friendly and save fuel to boot.

— Lynée Turek-Hankins