To combat these challenges a government initiative

To combat these challenges, a government initiative in 2012 distributed a two burner liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stove and one tank of gas to each household, but these stoves go largely unused today due to the relatively high cost of LPG (Partnerships, 2012). Most residents in the rural villages continue to use their Caspase-3/7 Inhibitor manufacturer cookstoves because they can operate it at little or no cost, and are accustomed to cooking in that specific manner.
Usability field experiment: stove testing and evaluation
Usability field experiment: discussion We acknowledge that these pot skirts combined with the channel stove do not achieve the same levels of efficiency or cleanliness obtained by other advanced improved cookstoves on the market (Foundation et al., 2012; MacCarty et al., 2010). However, by preserving the usability of the traditional channel cookstove, higher adoption rates are likely to occur; a tradeoff that we believe is more important than achieving the highest technical performance. As an example, consider the following scenario. In the Locuto community, our estimates predict approximately 75% of the residents burn biomass in their channel cookstoves daily. With approximately 300 households, and each household consuming about 16kg of fuel each week, this totals approximately 4800kg of wood burned weekly in the community. If a new top-of-the-line improved cookstove, that reduced wood consumption by 60% were introduced, it would be capable of decreasing fuel use by 2880kg per week if users exclusively cooked all their meals with the new stove. But, as with other advanced biomass cookstoves, adoption rates may be as little as 15% of the households, or only 15% of the meals cooked. That results in a fuel reduction of only 432kg of wood per week. In comparison, consider the proposed pots skirts presented in this article, that potentially reduce fuel consumption up to 28.8% (using the rough assumption that field performance is similar to the WBT laboratory test results). In order to achieve the same amount of overall fuel savings as compared to the top-of-the-line model, only 31.3% of the community would need to adopt the pot skirts–a number potentially attainable based upon the results of this study. We do not view these pot skirts as the ultimate solution to the regional problems these people face due to biomass cooking. The ideal situation is for the residents to move up the so called energy ladder and start cooking with cleaner fuels and technologies. But, as it has been documented in other sources, people do not make this transition in just one step (Barnes et al., 1994). They employ a variety of transitional technologies first, such as improved biomass cookstoves. Thus, the pot skirts presented in this article provide one of those transitional steps to help users recognize the benefits that come from cooking with cleaner, and more efficient methods. This experimental study has primarily been focused on the design of improved cookstoves and how a usability focused design has the potential to achieve higher adoption rates compared to a technologically focused design. However, a cookstoves design is not the only variable that determines whether it will be adopted or not. Other authors have hypothesized a wide variety of social, environmental, and economic factors that also go into influencing adoption rates. Such factors include education levels (Jan, 2012), occupation (Troncoso et al., 2007), household income (Pine et al., 2011), household decision making processes (Eltayebmuneer et al., 2003), and many others. Thus we cannot definitively predict what the long term adoption rates of these pot skirts would be without years of actual data.
Conclusions
Acknowledgment The authors would like to recognize the National Science Foundation for funding this research through Grants CMMI-1301247 and CMMI-0954580. Any opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.