DIY Rocket Stove Plans

Learn how to build woodburning cookstoves for your campsite, homestead, or backyard with these DIY rocket stove plans.

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by Muhammet Sel
This rocket stove took Muhammet Sel a few hours to build, but it'll bring water to a boil in less than 10 minutes!

Learn how to build woodburning cookstoves for your campsite, homestead, or backyard with these DIY rocket stove plans.

I fashioned my first rocket stove out of three cinder blocks, a couple of chunks of paving slab, a rusty can, and a brick that I dug out of an industrial dump beside the Kalamazoo River. It was free, DIY, and as ugly as could be. My second rocket stove was made from the same materials, and wasn’t much prettier. But when it came time to feed a hungry crew of guerrilla gardeners, both stoves lit easily, burned hot, and used only a few sticks of wood apiece!

My experience isn’t surprising because rocket stove designers aim for nothing less than radical efficiency — the best of these stoves burn minimal wood and produce little ash, smoke, and excess heat. Rocket stoves achieve their efficiency with do-it-yourself simplicity rather than intricate engineering or expensive fabrication. This, too, is by intention: Ianto Evans and Larry Winiarski designed the first rocket stove in the 1980s for woodstove cooks across the developing world, where inefficient use of fuel wood often contributes to massive deforestation and pollution.

A rocket stove’s central “elbow” design is fundamental to its efficiency. Similar to traditional fireplaces, a rocket stove chimney, often called a “combustion chamber,” creates a draft, but the elbow moves the cooking surface upward (away from the fire and coals) onto the chimney’s vent. While this placement would cause problems for traditional stoves, the rocket stove produces minimal smoke. Rocket stoves pull an ample, oxygen-rich draft from below a fuel shelf into the horizontal section of the elbow, over hot coals, through the burning sticks, and up the combustion chamber to the cooking surface. While all rocket stove designs use the same basic elbow template, creative makers continue to push the limits of performance and efficiency with improved chamber insulation, more efficient fuel use, and higher burn temperatures. Have you wanted to discover how to build a rocket stove for your own homestead or back patio? Here are five rocket stove designs that anyone with basic DIY skills can make.

DIY Rocket Stove for Camping

  • Updated on Jul 27, 2022
  • Originally Published on Sep 29, 2016
Tagged with: rocket stove
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