{"id":7988,"date":"2025-12-18T09:50:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T03:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/kara-dyikan-school-ash-collector-uzgen-2025\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T21:51:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T15:51:40","slug":"kara-dyikan-school-ash-collector-uzgen-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/kara-dyikan-school-ash-collector-uzgen-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Less than 100,000 som: clearing the smoke from a school in Kara-Dyikan"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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Climate \u00b7 Public Health \u00b7 Uzgen District<\/p>\r\n\r\r\n\r\n

School \u21167 in Kara-Dyikan, Uzgen district, used to heat 1,300 students with two coal stoves in the basement. After a 100,000-som filter retrofit this summer, the smoke stopped reaching the classrooms above.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

2025-12-18 \u00b7 Aziz Soltobaev \u00b7 KG Labs Foundation<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n<\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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This spring we drove through the secondary schools of Osh and Batken oblasts as part of a sub-grant from the European Union, working on internet access and on lifting the STEM teaching skills of teachers in remote schools. At one of our pilot points \u2014 School \u21167 named after Tagai Tashmamatov, in the village of Kara-Dyikan in Uzgen district \u2014 what we saw was not the connectivity problem we had come to fix. It was the heating system.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The basement held two coal stoves and a small boiler. Smoke and soot from the stoves were finding their way up through the building into the staff room and into some of the classrooms on the first and second floors. The school serves around 1,300 students and 120 teachers. The boilers had run that way for years. The teachers I spoke to had simply accepted it as a fact of cold-season schooling.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It stayed with me after we left.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\n

\"The
The two basement coal stoves at School \u21167 named after Tagai Tashmamatov, Kara-Dyikan, Uzgen district. The smoke and soot were finding their way into the staff room and the classrooms above.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Kyrgyz invention<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

At about the same time, news was circulating about a Kyrgyz inventor \u2014 locals call him Amantur baike \u2014 who had built a filter retrofit for coal stoves. The principle is simple. The filter sits in the exhaust path of the stove and captures the particulates that would otherwise leave by the chimney. The exhaust that does leave is meaningfully cleaner. The cost is low enough that a single rural school can pay for it without writing a grant.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We decided to apply the invention at School \u21167 directly. In June this year, the installation went in. The complete cost \u2014 the filter plus the installation \u2014 was under one hundred thousand som. The installation was done by \u041e\u0441\u041e\u041e Beybars, the contractor Amantur baike recommends. The decision and the work were both small enough that a school director could authorise them inside the existing maintenance budget.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The winter check<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

When winter came, the director of the school \u2014 Isakova Arzygul Zakirovna \u2014 sent me a video of the boiler running. The footage shows what the retrofit was supposed to do: there is no visible smoke at the exhaust, no soot drifting into the building, and the children and teachers inside the school spend the winter breathing air that does not contain coal particulates from the basement.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\n