Heating and Cooking with Wood
| We use wood
as a fuel for heating our homes, our water and for cooking.
We used to cook most of our meals on an open fire but this can be a pretty inefficient way to cook so now we have built our enclosed kitchen we use on wood burning stove build from an old oil drum.. Much of the heat of an open fire is quickly lost into the atmosphere and the wind cools the food. A stove or oven provides greater control over the combustion and burns the wood more completely and is therefore potentially more efficient. However we used to burn waste cardboard from packaging on an open fire to quickly boil a kettle and it takes much longer on the stove.
The stove in the kitchen is usually used to heat the water which is used in our gravity fed showers. We also heat the water for the bath by having an open fire built directly under the bath tub. When we build an enclosed bath house we will install an wood burning stove with a built in boiler with which to heat the water. Eventually we will be using solar water heaters to provide some of the warm water used in the showers and bath. We may also try using the heat from large compost heaps to provide hot water.
Our dwellings are heated by wood burning stoves. These stoves are much more efficient than open fires (and less smoky). They can be made to burn right through the night with one loading of wood. The small enclosed spaces in our dwelling are easy to heat and past experience has shown that often the problem is not how to be hot enough but how to prevent the space from becoming too warm!
Wood burning stoves can be made from old oil drums or gas bottles.
See also:
Why burn wood?
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