Sustainable Heating and Cooking Technology Part 2 - Lorena and Rocket Stoves for Cooking

There is an enormous worldwide problem right now of scarcity of cooking fuel, combined with health problems associated with smoke from cookfires. I read somewhere that this is the number 1 killer of children under 5 worldwide!

In some places, deforestation is taking place due to the demand for wood to cook with. Haiti, before the quake, was well known as an extreme example of this phenomenon, but there are many other countries with similar problems.

Enter the Lorena Stove:



I first learned about Lorena Stoves from reading The Hand Sculpted House by Ianto Evans. When I visited Cob Cottage company I was able to get a zeroxed manual for building one. A description and explanation can be found here:

Lorena Stoves

I quickly learned, however, that much has happened in the last 30 years and there are stove projects all over the world, often directly connected to reforestation projects.

One group, Trees Water People, has done a lot of work on this and has a lot of information on their website. They have worked together with Aprovecho in designing more efficient cook stoves for people in developing countries who are caught in a trap of scarcity of cooking fuel/deforestation.

Enter the Rocket Stove!





These are little, portable stoves that anyone can rig outside. They also form the inside mechanism for larger stoves as we will see (and heating units for houses as we have seen).









The following links contain details on building one yourself, if you like:

Rocket Stove Design Guide

You tube video - building the Winiarski Rocket Stove Part 1

You tube video - building the Winiarski Rocket Stove Part 2

For even further reading, a detailed manual on building the Rocket Stove can be obtained here, along with other cooking technology such as solar cookers and hayboxes, which use no fuel and, combined with a stove, can drastically reduce the amount of cooking fuel needed even further:

Aprovecho Publications on Cooking Technology

One of the Aprovecho publications, "Capturing Heat," can be read online here:

Entire PDF of "Capturing Heat"

The great thing about these Rocket Stoves in their simplest form is just that - they are so simple! Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement, and insulating them improves them a great deal.

Without insulation, much of the heat generated is absorbed by the mass of the stove. This takes more fuel, and sends less of the fuel directly into the cooking of the food. When all of the heat generated is directed into cooking, and as little as possible is absorbed by the rest of the stove or leaks out, less fuel is used and the stove is more efficient. Fuel can also burn more cleanly, putting less smoke and pollution into the air, or it can burn "dirty." I don't understand this aspect enough to explain it more than that.

The following link contains design specifications, and clear pictures of the process of building an insulated rocket stove:

Insulated Rocket Stoves

More technical info on the reasons to insulate your stove can be found here:

Technical Specs for insulated stoves

So now we have three innovations, the Lorena stove, the Rocket stove (with its "elbow" shaped combustion chamber), and the idea of insulating the combustion chamber.

This results in an improved stove that I'll elaborate on in great detail next time.