The Art of the Wood Cookstove

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Provided it is in good condition and used correctly, just about any cookstove will do a fine job of baking.“The only thing I don’t have the nerve to bake in the oven is angel food cake,” she says.

Kaylegian doesn’t use her cookstove as a primary heat source, but during the winter she welcomes the warmth of the stove. When she’s cooking, she just sets her propane furnace thermostat to 68 degrees, which keeps the house at a comfortable temperature.

Heating the Home

Those living off the grid are in an even better position to appreciate a wood cookstove’s many functions. Frank Tettemer and Cheryl Keetch live in a house in rural Ontario powered by solar-electric panels and a wind turbine. Inside, a Waterford Stanley-brand cookstove is their primary heat source, wintertime cooker and baker of meals, and producer of their domestic hot water supply. “I’ve owned it since 1986,” Tettemer says, “and it’s been used in four different houses.”

Tettemer’s loyalty to his stove can be explained in part by how well its design fits his home-energy needs. Most cookstoves have smaller fireboxes than woodstoves designed primarily for heat. But Tettemer’s stove was built in Ireland, and designed to burn either wood or peat; its firebox volume is larger than traditional North American cookstoves and does permit a reliable overnight burn. A small propane boiler provides supplementary in-floor heating and water heating when needed.

Tettemer and Keetch’s cookstove produces more hot water than many cookstoves, which often have water reservoirs that heat only a few gallons at a time. Instead, their stove has a more complicated hot water system in which water circulates through a collector in the firebox and back to a storage tank. Such systems can heat a larger volume of water, but must be carefully designed and installed, and users must understand them and keep track of their performance to make sure that the systems are operating safely and reliably.

Like all other aspects of wood burning, the production of domestic hot water is very much hands-on. Tettemer, a designer and builder of mechanically advanced off-grid houses, designed his own system, and he says his stove sometimes produces more hot water than he needs. “With the stove running hard during cold weather, the water sometimes overheats and causes the relief valve to dump water into a drain, unless we use some of the hot water,” he says.

Tettemer corrected that problem when he designed a hot water system for his neighbor Skye Faris, who bought a Heartland-brand ‘Sweetheart’ cookstove for her straw bale home. “It’s just a matter of matching collector output, storage capacity and hot water consumption patterns,” Tettemer says. “I’ll fix my own system when I have time to take half my kitchen apart to replace the tank.”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print