The Marian Stove is an intervention that can reduce fuel use, reduce indoor pollutants, and reduce outdoor air pollutants for people in the Rukwa Region of Tanzania.

A multi-pot stove with space for fast heating directly over the combustion chamber and areas for warming and simmering food in the back of the cooking surface.

The Marian Stove utilizes two key technologies:

A rocket elbow is a specific design of a wood fire chamber that maximizes combustion of the wood. Wood is placed on a tray within the rocket elbow. Air flows under the tray to the burning wood tips ensuring that all burning wood has sufficient air. Once the fire is started, air continues to flow uniformly through the stove due to the chimney effect. In addition, the chamber is highly insulated in order to concentrate the heat of the fire and not lose heat to the surrounding area. The design ensures maximum combustion in two ways. First by providing sufficient oxygen to the wood fuel and second by ensuring an extremely hot fire which makes certain all solids, liquids, and gases in the wood will burn. This highly oxygenated and hot fire reduces the amount of byproducts of incomplete combustion given off into the air. You can experience this phenomenon as the Marian Stove lights up, at first when the stove is cold the smoke will be white/dark like a typical fire but soon the smoke becomes perfectly clear. Open fires continue to burn smoky. They do not provide oxygen to all the wood and the fire never burns very hot. It is known that inefficient combustion in three stone fires is the main source of indoor and outdoor air pollution from open fires. The insulated rocket elbow technology in the Marian Stove directly addresses this problem and provides efficient combustion requiring 50% less fuel to heat a cooking pot.

The next technology has been around for thousands of years: a chimney. Chimneys are effective at maximizing the removal of smoke from a home. The Marian Stove is an enclosed design and has an integrated chimney ensuring that the fumes from the fire leave the living and working space. Dr Kirk Smith from the University of California Berkeley studied chimney stoves as an intervention for the health problems seen in women and children from indoor air pollution. He demonstrated in a randomized controlled clinical trial that 90% of the pollutants are removed from kitchens when utilizing a wood burning chimney stove. He also showed that the overall exposure of pollutants to women and children is significantly reduced. He went on to further demonstrate a significant positive effect on women respiratory symptoms when changing to chimney stoves from three stone fires. The Marian Stove team is very concerned about the health problems experienced by women and children in the Rukwa region and want to make sure that chimneys are more available, promoted, and utilized within their community.