Masonry kitchen stove
Posted by admin on Jan 21, 2013 in Blog, Our work | 6 comments
We builded a new small heater that we think will be very popular. This stove combines direct heat and stored heat. It is a fast and simple build, but it performes really well. This stove responds to many of the neads expressed by the people here. Learning for Winiarskis design principles I figured that a pushing the fire in a narow gap under the coock surface should result in a more effective heat transfer. (Sketchups are on the way) This stove is amazing to coock on because on one side you have frying hot temperatures and on the other side it is suitable for slow boiling and simmering food. The design makes the coocktop a more effective heat-exchanger than it normally is. I would sum up this stove like this.
- Small mass (300 kg) with quick response (sunny days in the winter can get quite warm and heating a big mass is not always desiered) It can be put on a wood floor without reinforcements.
- Instant heat. It can throw off a signifficant amount of heat directly from the coocktopp. This heat comes instantly after the fire is going.
- Effecient for cooking. The coocktop is ready in two minutes! It boiled 3 liters of water in 12 minutes.
- Burnchamber suitable for baking one bread after burn. Grills can be done on the coals to.
- Clean-effecient burn with secondary air provided in the back.
- Movable ( it can be carried by four men or slided on the floor to be put in a corner of the room for the summer)
- Cheap! This stove costs 35 azn in materials, that is less than 50 $. It can be builded in one day!
- Chimney temperature is low, but increases significantly if you burn it more than 1-2 hours. Mabe it can be completed with a bench to extract more heat.
- Works with the standard 4″ chimney that they use here.
- It can be suited with a small water-heatexchanger.
The family that are testing it lives in a mountain village where the winter is hard. They are reporting that it so far works great, heats much better than their old stove, uses significantly less wood, burns cleaner. It hardly neads any atention to continue burning. It is much better to cook on. It dosent nead to be cleaned often ( the old stove neaded chimeny sweep every month!) The draft is much better ,the door can be opened for fire gazing (and provide light when the electric is gone) It retains the heat pretty much through the night and leave some glowing coals to the morning so it is easy to light it up again. It makes the room dryer as it is provided with a more stable heat-source It will last longer before they nead to change it. We would say 10 years with minor maintainance.
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Thanks to your generosity in providing the Sketchup model for this stove, I’m building it right now, though it will be insulated and set into a stone-built outside cooking area rather than cased in metal as a stand-alone unit. Can I just ask a couple of things about it?
It looks to me that the draft is provided through the channel running beneath the firebox and opening into the back of the firebox and that the cut-away in the brick at the front of the firebox is for ash clean-out only? Is this right? If so, do you have any sort of damper control on the air channel? It’s hard to see this in the images.
Also it looks from these images as if the firebox is lined. Is this the traditional clay and wool liner you talk about in your post on materials?
I am glad this can help you. The flue on this model is on the lower back so the whole coocking surface is available. If you study the ScetchUp you can see it more clearly.
The draft neads to be provided both in the front and the back. The front is primary air, the back one shouts up behind the fire and mixes on top of the fire and works as secondary air. Without the primary air in the front the stove will be hard to light up. You can control the draft with the opening of the ash-door. But remember that if you close it to much it wont burn that clean. But for coocking it is sometimes necessary.
The stove has been in daily use in a family of four for some months now. Works great and saved them half of the fuel they usually neaded ! The father was smiling when he looked at the big pile of wood that they didnt nead for this winter !!
Happy building, and keap me updated!!
Hello again! I adapted your Sketchup model for our local firebrick dimensions and built the stove. Other building projects took over for the summer and I didn’t install the flue and test it until recently. It’s a beast! Fires up very quickly, burns efficiently and cleanly and is cooking in no time. And this still without a permanent set of doors (coming soon). What thickness of sheet steel do you use for the cooktop? I have been experimenting with ceramic floor tiles as cooktops. They work really well IF the whole tile can be heated evenly, but clay has such a low thermal conductivity that any cooler areas will stay cool and cause the tile to crack once the temperature differences get too great. I have a few tricks to try yet but if I have to go to steel then it would be good to know what you use and whether there’s been any problems with it warping. Great design! Congratulations!
Hi!! I am bussy setting up a commersial buisness making the stoves and solar heating now, so I almost havent been able to update this project. I am glad you liked it, I was also very impressed with the performance, specially for coocking… Steel is the only way , because tiles get fragile when hot, almost like glass. Then when you put a big saucer with poorige on in a hurry…. Try to get cast Iron if you can , if not, use as thik as possible normal steel, you can also reeinforce it by having bars welded as a framework under it. Go to a scrapyard and see what you find.I am currently building a 1400 brick multipurpose stove in my livingroom. It has a bench, waterheating, breadoven and cooktop. I hope to post some photos later…
2 questions for you.
-How do you transition the rectangular brick opening to the round 4″ flue pipe? Are you using a metal transition or clay?
-There is a channel down the middle of the first course of brick. Do you think the flue gasses can make their way forward and out the ash-door and into the room? Should there be a brick blocking this so that the base course looks like the letter “H”?
The transition can be made with the metall casing like i did, but if you are not using a metall casing but just purely set the stove in bricks you can just fill the gaps around the fluepipe with mortar and small pieces of bricks. If you make the mortar properly it will sitt like sement once it dries.
Thank you for your comment! There seem to be a bug in the drawing there. You can try to let air through there and see how it works
Mabe it is “design by accident” Normally it would not be good for the draft to have the opening straight through there. And you could get smoke back through the ash door in extreme cases, but it is not likely to happen if your chimney is providing draft. I wonder what the others that have used the drawing succesfully have done?? The stove I builded was closed there…