In doing this, and controlling the oxygen input, the rocket fire burns hotter and cleaner. The rocket stove catches and directs all that heat warming us up and puts it into the cooking. The logic is easy to explain: We sit next to the fireplace to get warm, but we cook atop the fire, where it’s hottest. ![]() In normal open fire cooking, heat is constantly escaping. The crux of the rocket system is that it harnesses as much of the fire’s heat as possible. The Design Basics for Roaring Rocket Fires It had to be simple to use, cost-efficient, fuel-efficient, clean, and DIY-friendly. Essentially, they set about redesigning the stove, specifically addressing the needs of the people using solid materials to cook. ![]() Cooking is a host of complicated issues.Ĭonsequently, a gaggle of philanthropic scientists set up about finding a solution to the problems: the rampant use of resources, the production of smoke, and the inefficient means of cooking. That same smoke, often first emitted into a tight space, has wreaked havoc on people’s health. While cleaner systems like gas and electric have their own resource-depleting issues, the massive amount of burning materials from rudimentary cooking systems creates equally massive amounts of smoke - carbon released into the atmosphere. It seems so distant from the typical US kitchen, but half the world cooks with fires from solid materials like wood, coal, and dried dung. (Smokiness is the sign of inefficient fuel use.) Rocket stoves specialize in burning less fuel, utilizing small circumference wood like the sticks and branches trees naturally shed, and they make very little smoke because the design creates a fire so hot that it burns up the wood completely. So, when Emma and I embarked on constructing another cob oven in a new location, we decided to address these problems, and what we discovered were rocket stoves. How was someone ever supposed to sustainably source so much wood every time they wanted to throw a pizza party? The other big downfall was that while in the process of getting the fire hot enough (an hour or two of coaxing), they were extremely smoky affairs, billowing black carbon into the atmosphere like an old-time locomotive. ![]() Equal credit to them.)Īll that said, there were a couple of things that bothered me about the ovens: The amount wood of needed and the smoke. (Note: I mustn’t leave out my wife Emma and several volunteers who helped on this project as well. By the time I’d reached Panama, I was ready to build one myself. They were supercool and could be easily made, even by complete novices to eco-construction. The growing trend around those parts was having massive cob - a mixture of clay, sand, and straw - pizza ovens. I first became interested in building my own ovens and stoves while volunteering on farms in Central America.
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