dances with wood: life with my cookstove
Posted by admin on 24 Sep 2008 at 09:39 am | Tagged as: selfsufficiency
Very informative article from Sharon Astyk about wood-fired cook stoves.
Why choose a cookstove? We have both a cookstove and a heating stove, although they only run simultaneously on unusually cold days or when we have guests enough to need to heat the whole house. During much of the year, the cookstove is our primary heat source, particularly in the early spring and late autumn, when the worst of winter’s cold abates, but it is still chilly enough to need a source of heat. We haven’t yet started the stove for the autumn this year – since wood smoke is polluting, we try not to use it when it isn’t truly necessary. But I’m looking forward to going back to dancing with wood.
If you are trying to decide whether to buy a cookstove or a conventional heating stove, it is worth considering what your priorities are. Do you already live in a climate where you can use a solar oven or outdoor masonry oven most of the time (ie, somewhere sunny, fairly dry and warm?) Then you probably don’t need a cookstove. Do you have trees on your property or lots of sustainably harvested and carefully managed forest in the area, so that wood makes sense at all?
Do you cook much? Can or preserve? If you live alone and rarely cook, I would go for the more efficient wood heating stove – remember, you can cook on one of those as well – you can put a pot of soup on the top of the stove, and even get or make a sheet metal oven to go on top of it that will allow you to bake. It isn’t as precise, easy to control or as large a surface, but it can be done. On the other hand, if you live in a large household, preserve a lot and cook from scratch most of the time, a big flat hot surface and oven going all the time might be a huge blessing. Also, where does your cooking energy come from? If you are cooking now with coal powered electric, replacing that stove with a cookstove might make a big dent in your emissions.
How much is cost an issue? What kind of stoves are available to you? New cookstoves are often a bit more expensive than new conventional woodstoves of similar heating ability. If buying an older stove, be careful with what you are buying – older stoves of both kinds may be heavily polluting and inefficient. Used stoves are often available, but make sure you know what you are getting, and that they check out for a good tight gasket seal and are in good condition. Also think about the costs and impacts of the wood you are using. If you live in a forested area, or can manage your own woodlot or track how wood is harvested locally, wood might make sense. In an area without a lot of woodland, where wood has to be trucked long distances, perhaps a stove using another fuel would be wiser. Many woodstoves can be adapted to use pellets or corn, but I’m not aware of a pellet/corn basket that would fit the smaller firebox of a cookstove – although such a thing may well exist.
How often are you prepared to tend things? A cookstove necessarily has a smaller firebox than most woodstoves, simply because a lot of the space available is used for the oven – so while some stoves can be banked and kept going overnight, many cookstoves can’t. Certainly, when you are cooking, if you need precise temperatures, you’ll find that you need to be able to be around, to feed the stove more often and keep an eye on things – it isn’t quite like setting the oven to 350 and walking away. It probably doesn’t require as much attention as you assume it does, but it does require more than electric or gas. Also, are you prepared to learn how to keep your chimneys clean, prevent fires, cut wood, etc…
Finally, how worried are you about having a source of heat and cooking power that doesn’t require electricity or natural gas. Since we have regular power outages in our rural neighborhood anyway, it is just commonsense not to depend on the electric lines for our heat (our oil furnace requires electricity to be used) or cooking. If you aren’t worried about your fossil fuel supplies, or have a better, more locally appropriate alternative, maybe a cookstove isn’t for you. The same would be true, even if you have these worries, if you don’t expect to be home to check on the stove regularly.
Hopefully, anyone switching to wood heating and cooking will remember the all important tree planting. Trees we plant now will be our wood supplies in 20 years plus. Think ahead!
