1. 1
According to the World Health Organization, around 3 billion
people cook using open fires or simple biomass and coal stoves.
Particularly in regions like rural Kenya, the population depends on
wood for cooking fuel because they lack access to more processed fuel
sources such as charcoal and natural gas. This need for firewood
places difficult demands on the region environmentally, socially, and
economically.
Our team at the Burn Design Lab, in partnership with the Uni-
versity of Washington and Burn Manufacturing, has been working
for two years toward the design of the world’s best production rocket
stove—a stove that burns small-diameter wood at the bottom of a
tall combustion chamber, making it look a little like a rocket.
Our stove is scheduled for launch in East Africa late this year.
The design phase is complete, and our laboratory results indicate
that we have created something special. Compared to a traditional
three-stone fire, our stove achieves an efficiency over 20 percentage
points higher, produces just one-quarter the smoke and carbon
monoxide, and brings a standard pot to a boil four minutes quicker.
Whether we are better than the competition is a more
complicated question. Cookstoves can be designed towards a range of
metrics: feed rate, fuel type, fuel size, pot shape and size, etc. I think
Continued on page 4
Recent changes at
Burn Design Lab
Meet the best production
rocket stove in the world
Inside:
Young children and fire........ 3
How you can help Burn......... 5
Country focus: Guatemala.... 5
Comings and goings............. 6
newss u m m e r 2 0 1 6
Continued on page 2
1
Five and a half years ago,
cookstove visionary Peter Scott
founded the non-profit Burn
Design Lab “to save forests and
lives in the developing world.”
Six months later, he created a
for-profit entity, Burn Manufac-
turing Corp., to actually build
and market more efficient, less
polluting stoves. It was a part-
nership born of the realization
that designing an outstanding
stove is essential, but not
sufficient unless the stoves are
produced and distributed to
users.
Over the past few years,
Burn Manufacturing (BMC) has
grown into the most prominent
cookstove company in Africa,
with a state-of-the-art factory
outside of Nairobi producing
10,000 Jikokoa charcoal-burning
cookstoves per month.
Meanwhile, Burn Design Lab
took on the development of a
natural-draft wood cookstove in
partnership with the Univ. of
Washington, funded by the U.S.
Dept. of Energy. This latter

2. Summer 2016 Burn Design Lab News
2
2
project has borne fruit in the
design of the Kuniokoa
cookstove (see article by Art
Sullivan, page 1).
Peter was the CEO of both
organizations, running them
together for the good of their
common mission, until last
December. That’s when I took
over the leadership of Burn
Design Lab (BDL) to allow Peter
to focus on Burn Manufacturing,
and to facilitate BDL’s
contribution to the world of
cookstoves beyond BMC alone.
The last six months have
seen a number of changes. To
start with a small one: this
newsletter. From what I can
recall, there hasn’t been a Burn
Design Lab newsletter in at
3
least two years. We are in the
midst of updating the website.
We brought on some new people
for the summer (see article by
Caiti Vinopal, page 6). In terms
of instrumentation, the Lab now
has a combustion analyzer and
three identical test hoods, in two
of which we can measure
particulate emissions.
More significantly, we have a
broader focus. As Burn Design
Lab, we support clean cookstove
development across the globe.
This ambition is not as quixotic
as the statement may seem; in
fact, it was Peter Scott’s vision
when he established BDL. By
working with BMC to develop
and refine the Jikokoa, we have
already helped create one of the
best charcoal stoves on the pla-
Burn develops new partners
Paul Means
From page 1
4
net. Likewise, the Kuniokoa will
be the world’s best commercial
natural draft rocket stove.
Burn Design Lab remains
fully committed to supporting
Burn Manufacturing through
design, prototyping, and testing.
Now we are also beginning to
collaborate with other
5
organizations outside of East
Africa where we can make a
difference, and are already
forging partnerships with
groups in Guatemala and the
Philippines. (More details in
our next edition.)
BDL is building on the
outstanding foundation laid
down by Peter Scott, Boston
Nyer, Lou Fezio, and many
others. What they
accomplished—the earlier
Jiko Poa rocket stove, the
Jikokoa charcoal stove,
forming Burn Manufacturing
to manufacture, market,
distribute and sell the
Jikokoa—is most remarkable.
Now BDL is taking those
projects’ lessons about
engineering and the
development process to
extend Peter’s original vision
to benefit people all around
the world.
— Paul MeansGuatemalan woman cooking tortillas on a plancha (cooktop) stove

3. Burn Design Lab News
3
Summer 2016
Students fire up stoves at Burn Design Lab
1
What happens when you
take seventeen 4th and 5th
graders and instruct them to
build fires in the name of
science? Learning, of course!
Last month, a class from the
Harbor School visited Burn
Design Lab, and we decided that
a little hands-on experience was
the best way to teach them
about combustion, science and
stoves.
When Paul Means initially
told me he wanted to set a
bunch of 10- and 11-year-olds to
making fires in groups, I
thought he was making a dry
joke. I have nephews and,
though they are perhaps not the
most angelic children, I would be
nervous setting anyone their age
loose in a group to play with
controlled fire. Maybe Harbor
School students would be better.
So as not to have a complete
fiasco that ended in screaming
children and a potential lawsuit,
I took every measure possible to
avoid injuries (or worse). We
don’t have child-sized flame
retardant suits on hand in the
lab, so I had to settle for gloves,
over-sized goggles, fire tongs,
and a chalk line which I called
“the circle of death” to
emphasize the danger of getting
too close to a working cookstove.
All this was augmented by a
lengthy lecture driving home the
fact that yes, we were playing
with real fire and yes, you could
get very hurt. The stoves are
actually quite safe, but you can
never be too cautious with
youngsters and fire.
My fears were assuaged,
however, as soon as I met the
kids: that particular age is a
special time where maturity,
2
innocence and curiosity coexist.
The students’ enthusiasm was
palpable. We started the lab
session with an interactive
lecture on the scientific method.
The students identified a
question first: “Which of these
five different rocket stoves is
most efficient?” They broke into
groups to discuss their
hypotheses and then listened
attentively as we explained our
methods, which were a
simplified version of our
standard laboratory protocol.
We tested the efficiency of
each stove by using a standard
amount of fuel and measuring
how long it took to boil a
standard volume of water. Our
test methods in the lab are
obviously more sophisticated,
but these simple test methods
were enough to practice the
3
scientific process and keep the
students engaged.
To my great relief, all of the
students were attentive and
respectful. They carefully and
enthusiastically followed our
directions and, for the most part,
successfully carried out the test.
Each group had a fire tender, a
note taker, and a temperature
tester. (The latter two doubled
as spies to check on the other
groups’ progress.) In the end, the
students had a great time and a
few even explained their final
results with surprising accuracy.
Of course, the Burn rocket stove
out-performed the others
(though we’ll have to verify
those results in the lab) and,
most importantly, the kids all
survived to build their own fires
another day.
— Bodie Cabiyo

4. Summer 2016 Burn Design Lab News
4
From page 1
In hot pursuit of the perfect rocket stove
In-country focus groups (below) and
testing (above) are essential steps in
the Burn Design Lab approach to
cookstove development.
2
we can safely say our stove is
the best in the world when
testing in optimum laboratory
conditions: with precisely cut
and dried Douglas fir sticks,
flat-bottomed aluminum pots,
and at a flame strength known
as the “3.0 to 4.0 high power
output range.”
But that’s still not the full
story. Making the stove
affordable and usable is
arguably the most challenging
aspect of stove design; i.e.
creating the stove that users
want and will use consistently.
In our design process at BDL,
we place a premium on
usability, aesthetics, and
durability. We designed several
unique features into the stove to
improve the user experience,
including a feed chamber door so
that the user can control the air
flow, an ash tray to keep homes
clean, and a self-storing wood
shelf to make the stove more
portable and take up less space
when not in use.
Every aesthetic and
3
ergonomic choice has been
carefully vetted by our market
research team. Now that users
in East Africa have been trying
out our prototype stoves for well
over a year, we have caught and
corrected numerous flaws that
kept the stoves from being as
usable as we intended.
The same is true for
durability. With our accelerated
testing program, we can judge
the stove’s longevity within the
course of a few months by
running it 24 hours a day. All of
this testing gives us confidence
that we’ve created a stove that
will last, save money, and
improve lives. Is it enough to
convince us that we’ve created
the world’s best production
rocket stove? We’ll need to wait
for the market to answer that
question, because a stove’s
quality is ultimately defined by
its impact. But cookstoves are a
wide-open field, and design is an
iterative process. Even if it’s the
best today, we can always do
more to make it even better
tomorrow.
— Art Sullivan

5. Burn Design Lab News
5
Summer 2016
Next stop: Guatemala
1
Burn Design Lab is planning to partner with
Hands for Peacemaking Foundation to develop the
next generation plancha stove for rural residents of
Guatemala. (A plancha is a large steel cooktop that
is often used for cooking tortillas.) The plancha
stove currently made by HFPF is very user-friendly.
The goal of partnering together to develop the next
generation plancha stove is to make it lighter, less
expensive, and even more efficient and cleaner
burning. All of BDL’s projects take place in a social
and environmental context; this is the background
against which our plancha project unfolds.
Guatemala is a mountainous, heavily forested
Central American nation. It borders the Pacific
Ocean between El Salvador and Mexico, and is
approximately the same size as the state of
Tennessee. After emerging from a 36-year civil war
in 1996, the country still faces many difficulties.
Illiteracy, a high infant mortality rate, and
malnutrition are some of Guatemala’s biggest
challenges, and more than 50 percent of the
population lives below the poverty line. Nearly 50
percent of the population is indigenous, and their
colorful hand-woven fabrics, paintings, and
mosaics can be found throughout the country.
The climate is mostly hot and tropical, with
narrow coastal plains along the margins of a
2
mountainous landscape marked by volcanoes and
rolling limestone plateaus. Agriculture covers 42
percent of the land, while forests take up 34
percent. Over 50 percent of the forest is considered
“primary”—the least affected by industrial
influences—and is among the world’s most
biodiverse. However, the country has lost almost
20 percent of its forests in the last two decades.
Deforestation on Guatemala’s steep slopes has led
to increased landslides, including one within the
Santa Catarina Pinula last October that killed at
least 280 people and buried many houses. In order
to reduce the risk of landslides, it is critically
important to protect the forests—an objective
advanced by the use of more efficient cookstoves.
— Mira Peterson
Burn Design Lab respectfully asks for your support
1
Much of our work is funded by foundation and
government grants, but private donations are
essential seed money that enables us to develop
new projects and partnerships. We are a 501(c)(3)
2
non-profit organization, making your contribution
fully tax-deductible. You can donate online at
www.burndesignlab.org, or use the form below.
Thank you!
Name Email
Address
City, State, Zip
Phone O Check enclosed O Please bill my credit card, below
Card number Exp. Sig.
Mail to: Burn Design Lab, 18850 103rd Avenue SW, Suite 220, Vashon, WA 98070 • info@burndesignlab.org • 203.871.1824

6. New faces at Burn Design Lab
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Solange Munezero (top) studies
chemical engineering at the
University of Rochester in
upstate New York. Originally
from Rwanda, she lived in South
Africa for high school, traveled
to Wyoming for a global
leadership fellowship, and will
study in Australia this fall. Her
passion for alternative energy
brought her to Burn Design Lab,
where she works as a lab stove
tester and data analyzer.
During a recent six-month stay
in India, Bodie Cabiyo (above)
worked on cook stoves and
research and development of
village-scale composting. Bodie
is our lab manager, designing
projects, analyzing data, and
2
creating new modifications to
stoves. In August, he heads to
UC Berkeley to pursue his
master’s at the Energy and
Resources Group.
Sari Mira (below) originally
came to Puget Sound from Saudi
Arabia to earn a B.S. in
mechanical engineering at
Seattle University, then headed
to the University of Dayton for a
master’s in clean and renewable
energy. He is a proud new father
and looks forward to getting
more sleep in the future. At
BDL, Sari is designing, building,
and modifying a gravity-fed
stick stove. This fall, he returns
to Dayton to pursue his PhD in
mechanical engineering.
Caiti Vinopal (top right) is ori-
ginally from Seattle, and now
studies mechanical engineering
at Rensselaer Polytechnic
University in upstate New York.
She enjoys working in the Paci-
fic Northwest, but misses having
compost here on Vashon! Her
passion for the environment led
her to the Brown Environmental
Leadership Lab, where she
learned about sustainability in
Louisiana, and has now brought
3
her to BDL, where she works as
a lab stove tester and procedure
analyzer.
4
Angela Schonbok—BDL’s
newest permanent staff mem-
ber, bottom right—has lived on
Vashon for 15 years and loves
the change from her native
Arizona, where she earned a
B.S. in wildlife conservation
biology from Arizona State
University. She has worked as
an IT administrative assistant,
and most recently was a stay-at-
home mom to her 7-year-old
daughter. At BDL, she keeps the
books, handles ordering, is the
entire HR department, and
makes sure the office plants
don’t die.
Angela takes over from
Amanda McConnell, who steered
Burn’s office for two years, and
this fall heads to Ireland to
study human rights law. Thank
you Amanda!