The Philips HD4012 is a fan-driven gasifier stove that burns biomass in a ceramic-lined stainless steel combustion chamber. This model is no longer being manufactured. The stove was designed by Paul van der Sluis, researcher at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven. This example was manufactured by Philips in Lesotho, used for a while in Zambia and then shipped to Lund Sweden for evaluation after which I got it. It uses a 6V lead-acid battery that can be charged by a small solar panel to run the fan. The fan is quite noisy at higher rpm:s. Weighing in at a sturdy 4.6 kg it is not an ideal backpacker stove, but it was not intended for that use. For more information about what is manufactured in this range in Lesotho, please check out ACE. I run the stove on wood pellets but it can be used with any solid fuel. The fuel needs to be in small size for the gasification to work efficiently, small twigs are better than huge blocks of wood. Dried dung is apparently a very good fuel for this stove. I added a MOLEX connector to to the lead to the battery since nothing I own fits the connector fitted to the stove. You start the fan buy pushing in on the knob, fan speed is easily regulated..... Since I don't know were this stove will end up I kept the original connector and just piggy backed a new connection on the leads for charging. ACE is short for African Clean Energy. This is the stove filled with about a liter of wood pellets and half a mouthful of kerosene. Thankfully the instructions tell you to light on the top. After the flames has stabilized you turn on the fan on low setting and put the kettle on top. After a short start up the pellets start to gassify and the combustion of the mix starts and you can turn up the fan as high as you want. The flame pattern is quite nice and the heat really strong! This is what is cocking today, a few kg of range scrap. After about 20 minutes There is a few kg of molten lead. Only partially cleaned up for now. After the stove has burnt out and cooled down this is the ashes left by the pellets. Mostly white ash. Thanks to the handles the stove can be emptied while hot if you need to ad more pellets. There is a huge need for good stoves in the developing world, a gasifier can reduce the need for wood or charcoal with up to 90%..... Hopefully there will e a significantly better stove on the market "real soon now", one with no fan and a clean high efficiency catalytic burner with Zero Emission. All the best! Lars
@bem1965 Many thanks for the great review, and history of the stove. It is certainly a unique example in what is becoming clear an area of continuing effort to reduce problems in areas of this world still relying on limited resources. And a technology also having limited resources cor it to develop to the potential it so clearly has. Clean water, education, food, equality, the stove may be a large piece of jigsaw that serious money is missing.
@bem1965 I’ll add my thanks too Lars. You’d mentioned the Philips stove in another thread on your Indian gasifier stove and I’ve enjoyed your report very much. Lot of good work being done providing cleaner-burning stoves - ACE, Biolite (their bigger family stoves) and Eco-Zoom - those I know about now, maybe there are more. John
@presscall and @Simes There is a lot of work and effort poured into development of more efficient solid fuel stoves... The UN is not only not planning an invasion of the US it really is funding a lot of research and projects. The Clean Cooking Catalog is a starting point..... The problem is that western thinking usually revolve around high tech solutions that are hard to apply sustainable to manufacture and use in the developing world. An efficient stove is a very liberating thing in may communities where mostly women spend enormous amounts of time just gathering firewood...... /Lars
I've got the ACE stove through a person that worked for a NGO for the refugee camps in Greece. We love it.
