Professor’s ‘Fuel Units,’ Made From Old Phone Books, Warm Hearths of the Needy

John Peterson’s phone log is something other than a way to keep track of long-distance calls.

His logs help some people stay warm during the long, cold winter and give others the chance to “reach out and touch someone” by lending a hand to low-income neighbors.

Peterson, a professor of civil engineering at Oregon State University, stuffs old telephone directories into discarded fiberboard tubes to make tightly rolled, slow-burning paper logs that are just the right size for wood stoves and fireplaces.

Last winter, with help from students, he produced several hundred of his “fuel units,” and donated them to the local energy-assistance program in Corvallis, a college town of 45,000 people in western Oregon’s damp, cool Willamette Valley.

Carol Mitchell, who runs the program, said the logs were so useful that she asked for more this winter.

Fuel for the Poor

“They’re wonderful!” she said. “We have people literally pulling the siding off their houses and burning it to keep themselves warm. If we didn’t have John’s logs to tide them over, they would be in danger of hypothermia.”

Peterson is not surprised that his innovation works so well.

“I suggested to some mechanical engineers that they analyze them for heat generation,” he said. “They found each phone log produced 10% more heat in BTUs (British Thermal Units) than a log of Douglas fir of equal weight.”

That means one box of 16 phone logs produces as much heat as 2.27 gallons of fuel oil, disregarding any difference in efficiency between burning logs in a fireplace or oil in a furnace, he said.

“There is one disadvantage, though,” he added. “Phone logs produce about two times the ash as Douglas fir does--but that’s just a minor inconvenience.”

Peterson began his phone log project after he failed in an earlier attempt to find a use for fiberboard tubes that came with rolls of photocopy paper.

First Design Failed

He had wanted to build a honeycomb-core panel structure, using cross sections of the tubes glued at both ends to plywood. Similar structures, made from aluminum, have formed the basis of airplane design since World War II, he said.

“The trouble was the adhesives’ not connecting well with the fiberboard,” he said.

So, with nearly 5,000 fiberboard tubes already stored on campus, Peterson began looking for an another way to use them.

He first tried to make fuel logs by stuffing scrap paper into the tubes. Even though he used a machine to force the paper in, the density inside was not enough for efficient burning.

Then he tried magazines in the tubes, “but they unraveled while they burned, and I couldn’t get a reasonable fire with them.”

Old telephone books, with thin pages that can be rolled tightly, gave Peterson a log that lights easily with paper scraps for kindling, burns evenly, and gives off good heat.

May Shorten Logs

Any thick fiberboard tube would probably work, he said. Now he is trying to determine how short a tube can be without diminishing the heat the logs give off--a formula that might extend his supply of tubes.

Peterson is fairly sure that there is no commercial application for his phone log design. “The advantage is that it uses materials that otherwise would be thrown away,” he said.

“We should spread the news about this,” he said. “If we get this out to communities around the country, people all over could be using this resource that is everywhere around them.”

For further information about the phone log design, write to Peterson at Oregon State University’s Department of Civil Engineering, Corvallis, Ore., 97331, or call him at (503) 754-3201.