Rocket Stove

I built this contraption last week. It is called a rocket stove and you will find thousand of sites with hundreds of variations on the internet, most on survivalist sites of one sort or another. I am not into the survivalist thing to much, my main reason for building it was coffee. I am a certified coffee addict and I drink it regardless of the weather or temperature. When it is 98 degrees F. in the house, lighting a fire in the wood cook stove is a poor option. We have a propane stove also but, as regular readers will know, I am a tightwad and gas for the stove has to be bought. We often build a fire in our fire pit to make coffee but you use up a lot of wood just to make one pot of coffee. As a tightwad, using up so much firewood  bothered me but my addiction to coffee is stronger so it has won out, until now. Having read several articles  about the efficiency of this simple device, and having checked to see that I won't have to buy anything to construct it, I went ahead and built one. As usual for me, this is a use what ya got project. Ann wanted to try it out and cooked bacon and eggs on it. Works fine but there is no low setting on this puppy!

I had several used pieces of stove pipe and selected two that are 7 inch diameter for the basic unit. It is that simple, it is a tee. I cut a hole in the longer one and cut the shorter to fit snugly against it. Two sheet metal screws on each side hold it together. I tested it just like that to see if it was going to work before I continued. I just pushed the bottom down into the dirt a bit and lite it up. Stick some small twigs into the horizontal part, set them on fire, and it creates a draft in the vertical part neatly focusing almost all of the heat produced on the bottom of your coffee pot! Since it seems to work well I added the base , a metal plate with two up rights and a bar to hold the horizontal section. I thought adding the slightly small second section inside the larger section would make it even more efficient. It just slides down inside and helps prevent some heat loss through the main pipe. I have a small grate I set on top to prevent sealing it off.

I did a actual test to see how well it really worked. I started with two quarts of water at 70degrees F. in a small pan. It took 8 minutes and 52 seconds to bring the water to a full rolling boil. I used 24.2 ounces of wood . It actually used less wood than that since I had just added a hand full of wood when it started boiling. The best part of this is that these were twigs that I normally would have used as tinder to start a real fire! I LIKE IT.