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Ideally, a wood cook stove should be your cooking range as discussed in The Winter=Heating Design Time. What’s more efficient than a single unit that cooks as well as heats your house and hot water? Nada. So, why even bother with another post about cooking options? Well, well, well, what about cooking in the summer? Did you even think about how you’re going to bake? What about other renewable energy source stoves?
Winter Wood Cooking, Summer Wood Cooking
We initially were planning on having an EcoZoom stove and the Kimberly stove in our tiny house. We thought we’d need the extra cooking space in the winter, but we decided that would be overkill exhaust piping, so we’re planning to rig up some type of flat-plate to increase our cooking surface on the Kimberly. This may be a disadvantage of the Kimberly; The Little Cod has a place for two burners–something we’re definitely going to need to replicate somehow on our stove. For summer options, we’re still considering an EcoZoom to cook outside. They’re still awesome and affordable units, and they run on twigs–I love things that run on twigs.
EcoZoom Plancha: $350 and EcoZoom Versa $110
Baking Adapter
For wood cook stoves, The Baker’s Salute Oven adapter seems to be a great option by Lehman’s. It does need to be close to your stove or at least close enough to get over 250 degrees, so it might be tricky maintaining your stove’s cooking surface with this unit. Also, you’ll have to have the right size stove pipes for compatibility.
We’d love to create and build a cob oven for our future farm homestead. Although this would cover our baking and pizza cooking needs, it’s a down-the-road option. In the meantime, we’re looking to use a Solar Oven.
Solar Oven and Hot Pot Panel Cooker
Heating for Alcoholics
Kai and Sheila from 2cycle2gether.com have found a wonderful alternative to a propane stove: The European Marine Air: Origo 6000 Oven with Stove. Being powered by a renewable source and having less toxic combustion gases makes this stove a sweet option. Visit Kai’s very detailed writeup on the unit here.
Fantasizing about your heating system comes naturally in a Syracuse winter. Living in an awful steel framed modular split ranch, we are constantly reminded of poor insulation and heating needless square footage. This scenario sets us up nicely to argue over that little waist high 2 in. x 2 in. white box on the wall, the thermostat. How do couples reconcile comfort and erroneous fuel consumption? An efficient building envelope and heating system are an excellent start.
Common Winter Quotes: Chris
“How many layers do you have on?”
“You’re in bed! You don’t need to heat the whole house!”
“You don’t even have long johns on. I wear a pair everyday!”
“Did you just turn up the thermostat? Honey, it’s fine in here.”
Common Winter Quotes: Michelle
“It’s freezing in here. My feet and nose are cold.”
“Are you cold?”
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. “It’s only 62 degrees in here!”
The Northeast Heating Option Winner
For the Northeast, the resiliency and self-reliance of an efficient wood stove is unmatched. Like Ben Falk, I attest that everyone should have a wood cook stove in their house. If efficient, it’s a single system that provides your house with heating, hot water, and a cooking range.
Kitchen Queen: Wood Cook Stove
When considering a unit, looking at the whole picture is important. Will the unit last multiple generations? Is the fuel source renewable? Does my system rely on forces I can’t control? What are my costs and bills? How much energy does it cost to create these systems (embodied energy)? Are my system’s components recyclable? Does it fit into a tiny house? Here is a quick general breakdown of three systems for heating, hot water, and cooking:
Wood Cook Stove
Typical House
Super Efficient Solar
$3000-4000
$8,000
$20,000 + PV panel cost
Renewables
Fossil Fuel
Renewables
A little labor
Convenient
Convenient
Wood Cost or Self Harvest
Electric & Gas Bills
No Bills
Indoor Air Quality Safety Required
Indoor Air Quality Safety Required
Excellent Indoor Air Quality
100-Year Plus *depends
20 Year Out-Dated System
30-40 Year System
Very Low Embodied Energy
Middle-High Embodied Energy
Very High Embodied Energy
When looking at options, you can’t beat the simplicity, durability, user-friendliness, and cost of a wood cook stove. Knowing that a wood cook stove is our most resilient choice, what’s the next step? Finding a tiny one!
Love at First Singe
What better place to look for an efficient wood stove than the finalists from the Wood Stove Decathlon by The Alliance for Green Heat. Although a lot of awesome international and national options, The Kimberly Wood Stove by the American Roger Lehet won my heart. His stove is two feet tall and 10 inches wide, engineered to last, looks sleek, and super efficient with a cooking top. This puppy can get an eight hour burn out of a pressed log, and you can heat your house with twigs during the day. Twigs or a half cord of wood is our estimated heating cost–amazing. Roger is currently developing a hot water heating attachment for it, too.
Kimberly Stove by Unforgettable Fire, LLC.
The Price of Love
Love always has a price, right? The Kimberly retails at $3800; however, the payback and future savings is immediate using pellet stove exhaust pipe and the lower cost of heating your house for decades. Passion and quality trumped our startup budget; I needed to have this stove!
“Shits and Giggles” Turn into Action
For shits and giggles, Chris types in “Kimberly Stove” on Ebay. Low and behold–there one is! A young couple is shying away from their RV life for their anticipated newborn, so they’re selling their just purchased stove. With zero liquid income, Michelle and Chris use some credit and start to post Chris’ car on craigslist for sale. Trading fossil fuel hoarders for fossil fuel purgers are the best trades. After a fierce auction battle (not really), we purchased the Kimberly for $2700. Fantastic. Now we have a trailer and wood stove–I think our order of operations is skewed.
Runner Up: The Little Cod
The Little Cod: To Cycle Together’s Choice
A lot of tiny house dwellers like our new tiny house friend and advisor Rowan and 2cycle2ether’s Kai invested in one of these puppies. Kai has a nice write up on his stove choice–here. It’s efficient, small, and very affordable. These are currently priced around $1050. $1600 for an enameled one.
Electric is an extremely inefficient way to create heat; however, there are some new technologies that are less irrational when it comes to the idea. Also, tiny houses have the benefit of heating a small space, so it’s less crazy.
Envi Electric Heater: 450watts: Potential Option for Wood Stove Backup: $140Econo-Heat 603: 400W Wall Panel Heater: Even lower energy backup heating panel.Climate Right: A/C and Heating 700-1200watts: $500
Everyday, composting is vindicated; it feels right. Michelle and I marvel how we never waste any food and all organic matter stays on our property. The most important take-away from my permaculture design course was, “…if nothing else, go home and make soil.”
Gun Jumping
Gazing out, we observed massive heaps of un-composted food scraps scattered on our garden beds from our compost bin. Chris defeatedly states, “This isn’t right, is it?”
Preparing to Turn the Heap
Materials List:
Compost bin(s)
Containers in house
Game Plan:
Have a place for food scraps
Location near house exit
Future: change to three pallet bins
Wasting a Resource
No food enters our garbage. As our neighbors pile countless garbage cans out to the curb every week, we put ours out once every three weeks, mainly filled with food packaging and … dog poop.
First, our food scraps go through phasing. Leftovers are given to the dog or cut up for the chickens. Remaining compost goes to our worms. Overflow food goes to the compost bin and eventually back to our garden. We recently bought some nicer steel countertop compost bins after our plastic containers broke. We have one container for chicken scraps and the other is for the worms and compost bin. In truth, we’d like to restrict putting out the garbage to once a month if at all. All this being said, we do have a lot of recyclables each week.
Countertop Bin: Smudgy surface but built to last.
To fully control our waste, our goal is to compost the dog poop separately and carry more canvas baggies for veggies at the market as well as buy only food with compostable materials. As permaculture states, “there is no such thing as waste;” we just need further adjustments to convert all of our waste streams into a resource.
Marjory the Trash Heap: Fraggle Rock
We bought an Exaco Thermoquick 110 gal. Composter. There wasn’t a tag on the unit, so we picked up the $80 unit for $25. At the time, I thought we got, as mom would say, “the deal of the century.” In retrospect, it’s a plastic piece of shit that is already falling apart after three years and the manufacturing, quality, and material of the product goes against our environmental and resiliency values. I want to stop buying products with short-term futures being the landfill. All products should have deconstructable and recyclable components.
The literal “breakdown” of compost plastic compost bins:
One isn’t enough. You have to stop feeding it organic matter to let it finish its thang; having one is misleading.
Plastic bins contradict one’s intent.
Certain plastic bins will break apart over time.
Compost needs to breathe; plastic design makes this hard.
We consider ourselves compost beginners still. We are still trying to get the right brown and green ratios, and we don’t have the proper three-bin system with proper air ventilation. We did flip the compost over several times, but it’s a lot of work with the plastic bin setup, and the outcome wasn’t ideal anyway (I believe the pallet system or tumbler mitigate this process). I’m looking for an easy maintenance system. View the resources below for helpful sites about composing, pallet bin construction, and proper ratio management. Although on the right path, adjustments remain.
The reins are ours,
Chris
Reflections, Hindsight, and Alterations:
Build three bins out of pallets instead of plastic ones.
Make sure it’s converted from food scraps before throwing it on your garden.
Get better at mixing brown and greens to get the right carbon to nitrogen ratios.
Place compost bin closer to our house’s entrance/exit.
