Description
Measurements of PM2.5 (UCB PATS+) and CO (EL-USB-CO) have been conducted in 10 households during 24 hours. The person mainly responsible for cooking wore a belt (see the below picture) with those two instruments for the full 24 hours (except for sleeping: then the participant put the instruments close to his/her bed). Of the households, four used an electrical stove for cooking, while six households used wood or charcoal (biomass) fuel.
Background
The increasing access to electricity holds the possibility of replacing biomass stoves with electric ones. This potentially decreases personal exposure drastically. Personal exposure, however, is not linearly related to electric cooking. For a household using an electric stove, other air pollution sources (such as coffee preparation and incense burning) might be present. Furthermore, household concentrations are influenced by ambient concentrations. Lastly, the personal exposure of one person is not only based on their household’s concentration, but on the concentrations on all different locations where that person will be.
Therefore, it is relevant to see whether a pilot study shows us in the direction of the big impact of electrification of cooking fuels, or that this potential is overshadowed by all other influences on personal exposure.
Results
The different measurements are numbered as household 1 through household 10. Households with electrical stoves are households 1, 3, 5 and 6. Below are different graphs of the measurements at the different households.
