Anyone use a wood cook stove?

[Beekissed]

We cooked on a wood cookstove all the time I was growing up. Nothing taste better than food cooked on a wood stove. Having said that, I will tell you that it takes practice to "learn" your stove. A lot of people pay big money for these and get frustrated right away because they feel like they can't efficiently regulate the temps and cooking times.

Cooking depends on the strength of your fire, the area on which you set your pots and how you damper your fire to get the right temps in the oven...all of these things take a little practice to get it right....well, maybe a lot of practice if you only use it sporadically.

The stove in the pic doesn't have an area on which to draw your pots away from the main firebox, so it would be very hard to simmer something while you are baking something else. This would be like cooking food on a regular heating stove, except it would have an oven. The trick to cooking a meal on a wood cookstove, is the placement of pots to different levels of heat for optimum cooking. Sort of like the burners on a conventional range...one can boil a pot on one, simmer on another, etc. The stove in this ad has nowhere on its surface to have multiple cooking temps.

 

[Zenbirder]

I finally got a chance to look at the new cook stove in the link, sure is cute! It is a more like a regular wood stove with an oven under the fire box. The 70% efficiency isn't the number to really worry about, it is the max BTU 30,000 per hour. You need to look at the size of your house, and how cold an area you live in to make sure this would be a big enough heat output. My stove can do almost double that, 57,000 BTY/hr, and is probably quite a bit oversized for our house. I would rather have the choice of smaller fires, more wood added and pull the damper back a bit on an oversized stove than have an undersized one if you are going to rely on the stove without a backup furnace. I imagine somewhere there must be calculations to help determine the size you need???

I upgraded my stove a few years ago, moved the older smaller one to my studio. In the heat of the summer was when I went looking for a used one. The stores are motivated to sell something to bring in cash on the off season. I was able to get a two year old, barely used stove for less than half the original price. Around here many people prefer the convienence of pellet stoves and this wood stove was a trade in on one of those.

I agree with Beekissed, this stove doesn't look to be a true cookstove top, and wouldn't be much different than cooking on a regular wood stove. Just has the advantage of an oven. Has anyone ever tried to build a box to set on top of the wood stove that would capture the heat and act like an oven???