The Art of the Wood Cookstove

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Faris has had great success with her cookstove, finding that in addition to providing reliable hot water, it also supplies adequate heat to warm her 1,000-square-foot straw bale home. Faris’ stove has a small firebox that doesn’t hold enough wood to keep a fire burning for the entire night, but her house’s superinsulated walls hold heat so well that this isn’t a problem. “I never get up in the night to put more wood on, even in the coldest weather,” she says.

Tim King of Long Prairie, Minn., is another cookstove owner who gets maximum use from his stove. He and his wife, Jan, have relied on their Waterford Stanley for cooking, baking, and home and water heating since they built their 1,200-square-foot house in 1984. Although the cookstove alone isn’t enough to heat their home, Tim says they have found a workable solution to this problem: two woodstoves. A wood-fired space heater is their main heat source, and the wood cookstove provides supplemental heat.

An Old-fashioned Design

The wood cookstove often is seen as a throwback to simpler times, and in many ways that’s exactly what it is because cookstove designs haven’t changed much over the last 100 years.

The most recent design change was more than 10 years ago, when some manufacturers promoted the addition of gaskets on loading and ash pan doors as the latest “state-of-the-art” cookstove feature. It wasn’t a new idea, since woodstove manufacturers started using gaskets to make their stoves “airtight” back in the 1970s. Simply sealing up the stoves didn’t deliver the promised efficiency, but it did result in smoky fires, as well as a rash of chimney fires. Improving the efficiency and reducing the smoke emissions of wood-burning stoves involves a lot more design work than adding gaskets to doors.

The wood-heat industry has yet to design a truly clean-burning wood cookstove, although it has succeeded on that score with wood-burning space heaters. Back in the 1980s when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established smoke-emission limits for new woodstoves, cooking ranges were given an exemption on the basis that the market was so small enforcing controls would be a hardship to both manufacturers and the mostly rural users of these products. But the exemption stifled innovation, and as a result, clean-burning, efficient wood cookstoves still are not commercially available.

Housing design has changed significantly over the last century, and we now live in more tightly constructed homes and are much less tolerant of wood smoke spilling into our living spaces. The result is that some of the standard design characteristics of traditional cookstoves can create problems for today’s users. If a cookstove has captured your heart, here are a few of the most common obstacles you should be prepared to navigate:

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