This year’s extreme affordability class included another team who worked with IDE Myanmar to continue refining the cook stove design that our team began last year. Fuel.d, the team made up of Lauren Hult, Tomas Pueyo, Santhi Elayaperumal, and Taiei Harimoto let us drop in on one of their testing sessions in June to see the pot skirt they designed and the merits of placing it over a three-brick stove so that it acts like a heat shield. Though it is not as efficient as replacing the three-brick stove with a rocket stove, pot skirts can be made cheaply, and could offer a lower price solution for those who cannot afford to buy a stove immediately.

Fuel.d also gave us great suggestions for making our stove design more robust and efficient. We can’t wait to try out their ideas in our next prototype!

I can hardly believe it was 1 week ago that we participated in Stanford’s Cool Product Expo 2009.

The experience was amazing.  We didn’t get much time to browse the other “booths”, but what we saw was pretty cool.  We were specially excited about all the Extreme Affordability born projects we saw there like Embrace, Driptech, and d.light.

Our booth was outside which turned out to be awesome.  It was threatening to rain all day, but we got lucky.  We didn’t have time to fire up our stove like we were hoping, but we did enjoy the extra space for our display (which we affectionately called our hut).

We ended up meeting a lot of old friends and made a couple new ones at our booth.  Several people ended up spending quite a bit of time with us–even doing things like brainstorming new pot-skirt designs.  We also met several bloggers and a writer from the Stanford Review.  It was definitely a great experience.

I’ll leave you with some photos from the event.