Fire, heat and cooking

Making fire without matches, and cooking and heating on very little fuel.

• Build a rocket stoveBoils a pan on a handful of twigs. The whole design rests on two rules: keep the cross-sectional area constant throughout, and insulate the riser. Get those right and almost any materials work.
• Run a bow drillFriction fire, taught properly, with a troubleshooting table for every failure mode. The dust colour tells you exactly what you are doing wrong, and almost nobody is told that.
• Hand drill, fire plough and fire pistonThe three friction methods after the bow drill. Two are harder than the bow drill and one is easier than all of them, and knowing which is which saves a great deal of wasted effort.
• Build and use a hayboxBoil for a few minutes, then let insulation finish the cooking over hours. Cuts fuel use by most of the total, and has one genuine food-safety rule that is not optional.
• Build and use a solar ovenIt genuinely works in Britain, reaching useful oven temperatures on a clear summer day. It also fails in exactly the season you most need it, and that mismatch is the whole strategic picture.
• Dig a Dakota fire holeTwo holes in the ground joined at the bottom. Burns hot on little fuel, hides the flame almost completely, leaves next to no trace, and is the right choice when you do not want a fire seen.
• Split, stack and season firewoodWet wood gives you roughly half the heat, coats your flue in tar and fills the room with smoke. Getting below 20% moisture takes one to two years in the British climate, which means starting now.
• Light a fire top-downBuild it upside down and light the top. Cuts particulate emissions by 50 to 80%, lights first time, needs no poking, and burns for hours unattended. The single easiest improvement anyone can make to how they burn wood.
• Make char cloth and firelightersChar cloth catches a spark from a ferro rod or flint and holds it. Wax firelighters burn for ten minutes in wind and wet. Both are made in batches from waste, and both are worth more than they cost.
• Rocket mass heater for an outbuildingA rocket stove firing into a thermal mass bench. Burns small wood for two hours and gives out heat for twenty. Also the most consequential build in this domain, with real regulatory and insurance implications.
• Ventilate indoor burning, and understand COThe page that keeps the rest of this domain from killing you. What carbon monoxide actually does, why a silent alarm is not proof of clean air, and how much ventilation is genuinely enough.
• Sweep and inspect a flueTwice a year burning wood, per HETAS. What tar looks like at each stage, why the third stage cannot be swept out at all, and what to do in the first thirty seconds of a chimney fire.
• Build a cob ovenA dome of mud over a sand mould. Bakes bread for a household on one firing, costs almost nothing, and lives or dies on one number: the door must be 63% of the internal dome height.