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Nationwide transitions from cooking with solid fuels to clean fuels promise substantial health, climate, and environmental benefits. For decades, Ecuador has invested heavily in consumption subsidies for liquified petroleum gas (LPG), a leading clean fuel. With the goal of understanding household energy use in a context where LPG is ubiquitous and cheap, we administered 808 household surveys in peri-urban and rural communities in Coastal and Andean Ecuadorian provinces. We assess cooking fuel patterns after long-term LPG access and the reach of induction stoves promoted through a recent government program.Nearly all participants reported using LPG for more than a decade and frequent, convenient access to highly subsidized LPG. Nonetheless, half of rural households and 20% of peri-urban households rely on firewood to meet specific household energy needs, like space heating or heating water for bathing. Induction was rare and many induction owners reported zero use because the required equipment had never been installed by electricity companies, their stove had broken, or due to fears of high electricity costs.Our discussion is instructive for other countries because of Ecuador's long-standing clean fuel policies, robust LPG market and standardized cylinder recirculation model, and promotion of induction stoves.

Ecuador presents a unique case study for evaluating personal air pollution exposure in a middle-income country where a clean cooking fuel has been available at low cost for several decades. We measured personal PM 2.5 exposure, stove use, and participant location during a 48-h monitoring period for 157 rural and peri-urban households in coastal and Andean Ecuador. While nearly all households owned a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stove and used it as their primary cooking fuel, onequarter of households utilized firewood as a secondary fuel and 10% used induction stoves secondary to LPG. Stove use monitoring demonstrated clear within-and across-meal fuel stacking patterns. Firewood-owning participants had higher distributions of 48-h and 10-min PM 2.5 exposure as compared with primary LPG and induction stove users, and this effect became more pronounced with firewood use during monitoring.Accounting for within-subject clustering, contemporaneous firewood stove use was associated with 101 μg/m 3 higher 10-min PM 2.5 exposure (95% CI: 94-108 μg/m 3). LPG and induction cooking events were largely not associated with contemporaneous PM 2.5 exposure. Our results suggest that firewood use is associated with average and short-term personal air pollution exposure above the WHO interim-I guideline, even when LPG is the primary cooking fuel.

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