Rocket Stove

A rocket stove is a wood-burning cooking stove that works far better than an open fire, because it insulates the fire and forces the hot gas up a short chimney and straight onto the pot.

Most rocket stoves are easy to build from low-cost or salvaged materials. They share a few features:

• The combustion chamber and the parts around it are as light and insulating as possible, so heat goes into your food instead of into the stove.
• Fuel burns in a short vertical chimney, which makes the fire hot and clean.
• The pot sits in the hot gas stream, often inside a skirt that keeps the heat against it.

Why build one

• Less smoke. An open fire indoors fills the room with pollutants. A rocket stove burns hotter and cleaner, and a chimney takes the exhaust away.
• Less fuel. It runs roughly twice as efficiently as an open fire, and burns small branches rather than split logs — so gathering fuel takes less time and does less damage.
• Safer around children. The fire is enclosed and off the floor rather than open at ground level.

The builds below all follow that idea, with very different materials and budgets: a steel drum packed with vermiculite, an earthen two-pot stove built from anthill soil, and an adobe stove built into a kitchen.