Build a Recycled Water Heater Wood Stove

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Photo By Fotolia/JGima
You can build a recycled water heater wood stove for $35.00 or less.

Learn how this recycled water heater wood stove can heat your home while helping the planet.

(Note: Since this article was published in 1978, building codes and homeowners insurance rules have changed, and federal rules governing wood stoves have been adopted. This stove design may not comply with various federal and local regulations. Readers are advised to check with appropriate officials before installing this stove in their homes. — MOTHER)

Most homebuilt wood-burning stoves are scabbed together from old 55-gallon drums. And they more or less do the job they’re supposed to do . . . despite the fact that they’re notoriously inefficient users of fuel, are difficult to regulate, rapidly burn through, and are so ugly that most people will only tolerate them out in the garage or workshop.

Perhaps the single really good thing that can be said for the majority of the 55-gallon-drum burners is that (usually) it doesn’t cost very much to put one of them together or at least it didn’t used to. Here lately, though, the steel barrels have become increasingly difficult to find . . . and, when you do locate one of the containers, it frequently has a seven dollar price tag at fixed to it.

There must be a better way to go about assembling a homemade wood-burning stove. And there is: As MOTHER was recently shown by Wilton, Iowa’s Robert Wars (who, incidentally, just happens to be the brother of MOTHER researcher Emerson Smyers).

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