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Accurate, accessible methods for monitoring and evaluation of improved cookstoves are necessary to optimize designs, quantify impacts, and ensure programmatic success. Despite recent advances in cookstove monitoring technologies, there are no existing devices that autonomously measure fuel use in a household over time and this important metric continues to rely on in-person visits to conduct measurements by hand. To address this need, researchers at Oregon State University and Waltech Systems have developed the Fuel, Usage, and Emissions Logger (FUEL), an integrated sensor platform that quantifies fuel consumption and cookstove use by monitoring the mass of the household’s fuel supply with a load cell and the cookstove body temperature with a thermocouple. Following a proof-of-concept study of five prototypes in Honduras, a pilot study of one hundred prototypes was conducted in the Apac District of northern Uganda for one month. The results were used to evaluate user engagement with the system, verify technical performance, and develop algorithms to quantify fuel consumption and stove usage over time. Due to external hardware malfunctions, 31% of the deployed FUEL sensors did not record data. However, results from the remaining 69% of sensors indicated that 82% of households used the sensor consistently for a cumulative 2188 days. Preliminary results report an average daily fuel consumption of 6.3 ± 1.9 kg across households. Detailed analysis algorithms are still under development. With higher quality external hardware, it is expected that FUEL will perform as anticipated, providing long-term, quantitative data on cookstove adoption, fuel consumption, and emissions. |
