MANILA, Philippines?Virgie, a mother of a 20-month-old boy, uses two glass bottles of ketchup every time she prepares her improvised stove for cooking?a rather strange practice for people unfamiliar with the contraption.

The stove is a rusty four-liter paint can with an opening twice the size of a peso coin near the base, and three smaller holes just below the rim.

Virgie uses one bottle to tamp the sawdust around the other bottle that is made to sit in the middle of the can. When the second bottle is lifted after the pressing is done, a cylindrical cavity is formed.

By Virgie?s reckoning, her family is one of some 50 households using kusot kalan (sawdust stove) in her immediate neighborhood in Sikatville, a community in Tunasan, Muntinlupa City.

Many of the households have shifted to sawdust early this year when prices of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and kerosene soared beyond their reach. From P454-P500 on July 28, 2006, the dealer?s pick-up price of an 11-kg LPG tank rose by 42 percent to P645-P708 on July 30, 2008.

Several of the neighborhood?s kusot kalan were in use in an alley and a vacant lot when the Philippine Daily Inquirer recently dropped by Virgie?s home at lunchtime to learn how the stove works.

?Its smoke blackens pots and pans, but it saves us money,? she says of her kalan, comparing it with her LPG stove, which she has stowed in her tiny home. A dark blue 11-kg LPG cylinder from Caltex stands in one corner not far from the cloth hammock that holds her sleeping son.

Her partner, Edward Olecia, a barber, buys sawdust at P5 per sack from a nearby sash factory.

Virgie has been using the sawdust stove for more than two months now, saving her family a lot of money. Her family spends just P20 a month for cooking fuel because a sack of sawdust is good for one week.

By contrast, a liter of kerosene that costs her family more than P50 lasts only about two or three days. She used a kerosene stove for a week after her LPG stove broke down.

Savings derived from the improvised stove are used for basic necessities, especially food.

?But the savings are not enough because of other expenses,? she says, like the monthly electricity bill and a loan from a ?Bombay.? [Her family pays more than P800 a month for electricity despite using less than 50 kWh because of the hefty P18/kWh being charged by the owner of the electric meter from which the family has connected a sub-meter.]

It was Virgie, hard-pressed to make ends meet, who thought of shifting to sawdust, urging Edward to make the stove from an empty paint can with the use of a knife.

A few kilometers from the home of the Olecias, a cluster of 10 households has also stopped using LPG. One of the families in Tibagan, San Pedro, Laguna, is that of Reynaldo Zabala, a welder, who has not used his LPG tank for the past nine months.

His family of three has shifted to charcoal. ?What?s painful about LPG is you plunk down more than P600 for an 11-kg cylinder. Ay Dios,? says Zabala, who earns P360 a day. The LPG that he used to buy usually lasted 1 and ? months.

?When the price of LPG shot up to P585, I stopped using it,? he says. Zabala now spends P200, up from P180 in July, for a sack of charcoal that lasts his family three weeks.

Like the Zabalas, Bella de la Peña, a mother of three grown children in Plaridel, Bulacan, is keeping her LPG stove on standby.

Rice husks

Since February, Bella has been using sipag kalan, a stove fueled by rice husk, enabling her to save the equivalent of five 11-kg tanks of Gasul (worth more than P3,000). Gasul, the LPG brand of Petron Corp., is good only for three weeks for Bella, who also cooks for farmhands.

She gets the husks for free from the rice grown on several hectares of farmland that her husband manages in Plaridel town.

Bella has no plans of shifting back to LPG anytime soon. ?Should its price drop to P350 per tank, I will go back to Gasul. At present the price is so steep,? she says.

The shift to cheap fuel by households that can no longer afford LPG has caused a significant drop in LPG sales.

Paul Santos, president of the Shellane Dealers? Association, saw the volume of LPG he sold in the past two years drop by about 20 percent. Shellane is the LPG brand of Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp.

?The decline is much bigger in the provinces,? says Santos, whose dealership covers Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas and Valenzuela in Metro Manila. People in the provinces generally have lower incomes than residents of Metro Manila.

50-percent decline

A dealer of another brand in San Pedro, for instance, has suffered a drop in sales of more than 50 percent over the past year. ?In August last year, we were selling 500 LPG tanks for households daily. Last month, we could sell only about 200 to 250,? says Carolyn Macamay, operations manager of JKO Silver Bright Inc.

The decline in the use of LPG and kerosene is a nationwide phenomenon, data obtained by Inquirer Research from the Department of Energy show.

From 3.01 million barrels in the fourth quarter of 2006, LPG sales declined progressively in the next five quarters. By the first quarter of 2008, before LPG prices peaked, the volume was down to 2.84 million barrels.

Kerosene suffered a sharper drop during the period from 434,000 barrels to 371,000 barrels.

Middle-class households are also contributing to the decline. They are not abandoning the fuel en masse, but many of them are not using LPG as often as they did before.

Three stones

Merlinda Balmes, who lives in a subdivision in Imus, Cavite, has turned to a stove, made of three big stones placed apart to form a triangle, to extend the life of her LPG cylinder.

?We use our makeshift stove when cooking meat which takes a long time. But that?s very rare. Otherwise, we use it to boil water containing herbs that serves as my husband?s drinking water and concoction for his kidney problem,? Balmes says.

She has three children, two of whom are overseas Filipino workers. The last time she bought an LPG cylinder was in the first week of July at P620. ?Our LPG lasts one month and two weeks if we are not using wood scraps,? says Balmes, who operates a small sari-sari store at ACM Woodstock Homes. With the makeshift stove, her family buys an LPG tank every three months.

Way of life

Hailing the benefits of a wood-fired stove, Balmes says the rice and meat cooked on it ?tasted so good.? In addition, ?the leftovers don?t get spoiled easily.?

Despite the high cost of LPG, Balmes says it is difficult to give it up. ?Nowadays, we use LPG for easy-to-cook foods like noodles. We use it in the morning to boil water for our coffee and to cook rice and fish for breakfast and lunch. Then we use it again to cook rice in the evening,? she says.

Using both the wood-fired stove and the LPG ?has become our way of life,? she said. With a report from Santiago R. Alcantara