10 Ways To Make The Most Of A Wood Stove On Your Homestead

If you’ve ever considered starting up a homestead of your own or just want to live off grid, many people consider a woods stove for their home. They not only provide a link to a simpler time, they also save you money on your fuel bills every month.

use wood stove

 

A wood stove can come in many forms and can burn many kinds of fuel, but they all provide a wide range of benefits. Some are common sense, like cooking our food and heating your homestead. Some are not so obvious like dehydrating foodstuffs for long term storage or, believe it or not, generating electricity. But more on that later on.  Let’s take a look at some of the ways that you can maximize the value from your wood burning stove.

 

1: It cooks your food

Well, this one is a no-brainer, but anything you can cook on your gas or electric fired stove or oven you can cook on a wood burning stove. Place your pots or pans on the top of the stove, and cook just like you normally would.

A pot belly or Franklin style stove only have enough space for two or maybe three items. A wider kitchen style stove, like the one your grandmother may have used in her younger days, will be as wide as a conventional stove and will have room for three or four cooking vessels.

Some models come with just a flat surface for cooking, while those designed for use in the kitchen will have a flat cooking surface and an oven built in as well. If you don’t want the bigger kitchen style stove you can still bake using a cast iron or aluminum dutch oven on the stove top.

2: It dries your clothes

Your wood stove is a giant heat generator and you can string a clothes line around three sides, keeping it a few feet away to avoid burning your clothes, and let the heat from the stove provide the same results of an electric clothes dryer without the power bill. Boots can be dried the same way on the floor, just remember to keep them a foot or so away from the stove.

3: It dehydrates your food

Build drying trays with narrow slats to let the warm air get to the food you want to dehydrate. They should be as wide as your stove top to take advantage of all the heat rising up.

home made dehydrator over wood stove

Many homesteaders dehydrate their food for long term storage. You don’t need to buy a dehydrator at the store when you can make your own racks and hang them over your wood stove.

Mount them on the wall or around the stove pipe a few feet above the top of the stove. Make sure to keep them well above any cooking vessels you might be using. The heat rising off of the stove will provide the gentle, slow heat needed to dry out whatever you want to dehydrate.

4: It heats your house

Another no brainer is that it will heat your house. At a minimum it will heat the room that it is located in, but there are ways to transfer that heat into other areas of your home. If you have a chimney attached to it, the hot air will running through the chimney will provide some heat to the other rooms it runs through.

heat smaller room wood stove

Wood stoves come in all sizes so if you have a room that isn’t heated from your main wood stove, you can put a smaller one in the room that needs it.

You can also surround the stove with a wall of bricks, stone, or other masonry materials to serve as a heat sink that will serve as a radiator to warm the room after the stove has burned out.

If you have a fireplace, and the duct work in place to circulate the warm air into other rooms a wood stove in the form of a fireplace insert is another option for you to consider.

5: It keeps you in shape

 

If you haven’t heard that wood is the only fuel that warms you twice, you will understand it if you choose to use an axe to cut and process your wood into stove sized pieces. You get warm the first time just processing the wood, the wood stove is where you get warm the second time.

6: It humidifies your air

humidify moisture in air pot of water

Without central air conditioning the air in any home can get very dry. That is one reason many people prefer gas heat over electric heat, because a byproduct of burning the natural gas is water vapor which helps to humidify the air.

You can achieve the same thing by placing a pot of water on top of your wood stove and keeping a fire going in it. Even a small fire will be enough to help the water in the pot turn to vapor and release it into the air.

7: It dehumidifies your air

Conversely, on humid days, the dry heat from your wood stove can help to turn a muggy day into a comfortable day. Leaving the fire door on the front of the wood stove open for a while can speed up the process.

8: It heats your bed on cold winter nights

Well, it can heat your bed warmers so they can do you some good on those cold winter nights. You can buy bed warmers or make them yourself. In colonial days they were enclosed pots with long handles that you filled with hot coals from the fire or stones that were warmed in the fire. They were placed in the bed to warm it up before retiring for the night, moving it around like an iron to warm all parts of the bed.

coals pre heat your bed

You can achieve the same effect by putting fire bricks on top of your wood stove so that they can get nice and hot and store lots of heat. Bricks that are wide and just a couple of inches thick will work the best to store energy and still have a good amount of surface area to transfer it to the bed.

Once heated, wrap them in a blanket and place them in the bed before going to sleep, or put them at the bottom of your bed to keep your feet warm, just like you would with a hot water bottle. Warm feet will go a long way to keeping the rest of your body warm too.

9: It gives you ashes and char wood

wood ash char wood icy walkways

Wood ash and char wood have many uses. In winter they provide a cheap and biodegradable way to melt snow and ice. They also provide more traction on slippery walkways.

Ash, the gray powdery material left in the bottom of your wood stove when everything has burned is actually quite useful around the homestead. It is very alkaline, so you can use it in a slurry of water and ash to help tan animal hides. You can also put a bit in the hole where you are putting plants that like an alkaline soil like tomatoes, garlic, onions, and asparagus.

You can mix it with fat and water to make soap. It can also be used as a mild abrasive for cleaning your hands or pots and pans.

Its alkaline nature also makes a natural ice melting product, so you can sprinkle it along icy roads or walkways. Add in the smaller chunks of charred wood from the bottom of the stove and you can also add some traction to those slippery surfaces.

10: It generates electricity for you

Biolite camp stove

A Biolite camp stove that cooks your food and also converts the heat from the fire into electricity with the orange box on the side of the stove.

Thermo electric generators, or TEG devices for short, are deceptively simple devices that convert heat into electricity that you can store in a battery. They are based on a phenomenon called the Seebeck Effect where the difference in heat between two pieces of metal, like steel and aluminum, can be used to generate an electrical current.

If you want to channel your inner engineer and learn more about the technology you can check out the TEGPOWER website and then go to the TEGMART site to buy the components you need to build your own custom system. A builder and homesteader in British Columbia tried his hand at it to build a thermo electric generator that is attached to the wood stove.

A few companies, the most well-known being BioLite, make small wood burning stoves that have TEGs built into them. They all work by using the heat in the metal container or from the boiling liquid to generate electrical energy.

Put it where it will do the most good

The placement of your wood stove has much to do with how well it meets your needs and serves its purpose. The first consideration is what you will use it for. If cooking is one of its intended uses then you will want to place it in or near your kitchen.

If the stoves purpose is mainly to provide warmth in the house, then placing it in the room where you spend the majority of your time will serve you well. If you have a central room with other rooms off of it then the stove can radiate its heat into those rooms as well. Just remember that heat radiates in straight lines so if there are corners to go around you might want to use additional stoves to heat those rooms.

wood fire place in house

Placement in a central room, especially one on the interior of the home where it is better insulated, will allow your wood stove to serve multiple purposes in one location; heating, cooking, and drying clothes. This consideration is especially important in the event of an emergency where it is the only source of heat in the house, such as during a natural disaster where your normal source of energy is not available.

The owners of a repurposed school bus decided to place their wood stove between where the kitchen area ended and the living space began. In this way one stove provided a cook top for kitchen and heating for the living area.

Buy the Right Kind of Wood Stove

Another key decision you need to make is what kind of stove you want, and what material should it be made of.
Do you plan to cook with it? Will you be doing any baking? Is its only purpose to keep the house warm? Will you be heating water with it? How large are the rooms you need to heat? These questions all feed into what kind of wood stove to get.

pot belly wood stoveIf baking is even a slight possibility, then you should definitely give thought to buying a stove with a flat top for cooking and an oven for baking. There are ovens that you can put on top of a flat top stove, but they are less efficient than one that is built in.

Pot belly stoves, or Franklin stoves, are good for heating rooms and for heating or cooking a few things at a time due to their smaller flat top surface. If you want a general purpose stove, then this style is a good choice. It requires less fuel than the larger stoves designed for use in the kitchen. They also normally cost less than the larger kitchen stove designs.

The materials the stove is made from is also an important consideration. Steel stoves may be more durable but they do not store heat well. So, when the fire dies out they will lose their heat quickly. Stoves with a cast iron construction hold heat longer, they will even provide enough heat to continue cooking once the fire has gone out. They also continue to radiate heat into the room longer.

Another option, especially if you do not want to build a wall of masonry or similar materials around the stove to serve as a thermal battery, is to look into a soapstone lined stove or one with an insert that will hold the heat.

…and finally, think about size

In addition to the variety of materials used to make wood burning stoves, they also come in a variety of sizes. There is enough variety to find the right size for your own unique needs. The table below provides some good guidelines on what size stove to get.

Size Area to heat Firebox size
Small 600-1000 square feet Less than 2 cubic feet
Medium 800-2000 square feet 2-3 cubic feet
Large 1500 – 3000 square feet More than 3 cubic feet

 

Your Turn

  • What kind of wood stove would best meet your needs?
  • In what ways do you make the most of your wood stove?
13 Comments
  1. It is better to have a little undersized stove so you can burn it hot than it is to have a oversized stove that you have to under burn that will create a creosode problem in chimney.

    • I have found that wood stoves over time lose their capacity . in other words i would suggest buy a bigger stove. my second wood stove was too small and one afternoon it was o degrees f i had that stove full of good dry maple running at full capacity and the house never got above 65 degrees f.

  2. Good reading. Nice article. Thanks so much.

  3. Pot belly stove is a great addition for small rooms, apartments, offices and more. It does not only look stylish, but it is very economical to use since it requires less fuel.

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  4. Very interesting read ! I am currently working on a old cast iron stove and I will be using it for heat and possibly cooking. Can I put coal in it after I get it going with wood ?

    • only if it is rated for coal. if not you can ruin your stove

  5. The TEG appears good for conserving energy. I wonder the effectiveness of the stoves?

  6. i have been through 3 stoves now and i burn several cords a year. i would suggest that anyone buying a wood stove get a slow burning one. i had a franklin type wood stove as my first, big mistake. yes it would heat up he place real quick but after that you could not slow it down enough.

    • what do you recommend as a slow burning one?

    • Hi Bill,
      I’d ask the same question Rose did, which slow burn stove would you recommend?

  7. Great articles. I appreciate the input.Great information and common sense. Happy Holidays To All.

  8. Excellent article – I am planning on installing one next year in my mobile homeand this information will help a lot.
    Karyll

  9. what kind of wood 2 burn on pot belly stove 2 give out more heat

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