Prepping 101: $998 Off-Grid Wood Cookstove $995

This is my stove! I bought it on 2010 for $600 on eBay. It is produced in Mexico. Yes it is flimsy thin metal but it works just fine. Actually puts out quite a bit of heat but like another poster said the fire goes out quick. but that’s okay for me because we have another wood stove that heats the house

It looks cheap and flimsey to me. I use a wood stove all winter to not only heat my 800sf house, but also for cooking. All you need is an old used wood stove with a flat top and I have two metal boxes stacked on the right for baking in. They are tin with a rack inside and the Amish use them. One has a heat guage, low/Med/high. Med is about 300°F. I cook biscuits, cakes, pies, potatoes in the “Dutch oven”. I think I paid $2.00 each for them at an auction. I paid $200.00 for the wood stove with the flat top, got it from a stove place, someone had traded it in. I’ve seen similar stoves sell for as little as $50. At yard sales! As far as heating water, I just keep a pot on top or if needed, I can sit a metal container on the hearth next to the stove and it gets boiling hot. My stove pipe is a seamless steel pipe. It will last longer than me. The thin stuff they sell at hardware stores will cause you grief. My stove pipe new was $200. But lasts a long long time. To keep kreasote from building up, just throw potato peels into the fire. It melts the creasote and it runs back into the stove and eventually burns up. Kind of like how a pan of ammonia will clean dirty grill racks except peels don’t smell. When you do the math, it pays to put your money into the stove pipe and not burn your house down or smoke yourself out. That stove doesn’t appear to have dampers for airflow and draft which is how you control the heat and smoke. Do your homework kiddo. Don’t become a statistic.

I live just a couple of miles from Kidron, Ohio. We are fortunate to have Lehman’s hardware which carries a ton of different kinds of wood stoves and cook stoves and combinations that will do both. They have a catalog and web site. I am in the middle of the largest Amish community in the US and so we have a lot of used stoves that come up at estate sales. Wood burners for cooking are fine but it takes awhile to get the hang of it. Many people keep them in a summer kitchen to keep the heat down in the warm months. Use good double lined smoke stack that is higher than your house to avoid the smoke issue and the problem with stack fires. The investment is a wise one. Back a few years we had almost the entire neighborhod in our house when the electric was out. We ate well and were toasty warm.

we had an old Prizer stove like this that burned coal or wood. used it for 35 years till we sold the home in’13. not only cooked , but heated half a 2000 sq.ft house. as long as the stove and fire box are cast-iron it should hold up well. take out a building permit. if there is a fire without an inspection home owners insurance may refuse to pay.

We had one like this on our farm in Indiana in the 1950’s, I was 5years old, it sat in the middle of the kitchen, sometimes dad would burn coal in it, must be a good design as it looks the same, we took baths in a galvanized wash tub behind it. Brings back old memories.

These stoves were great in the kitchen, but unless you lived in a “really” small house, maybe something like 500-600 sf or less, you couldn’t heat the whole house with it. The fire boxes tended to be small; fires tended to be short and hot. It was a cook stove, primarily. You could never really throw enough wood in to go overnight.

Google ” Dutch oven”…

I would be very surprised if this stove turns out to be a value, this coming from someone who’s burned coal and wood his entire life. My most recent disappointment is the rusted pile of iron sitting out back that used to be an Elmira Stove Works ‘Oval’. Oh, I got about 15 years of use out of it – which might seem like a useful product life to the uninformed. I can also show you the ‘Warm Morning’ coal stove that is being used this very minute, and it has got to be at least 70 years old. The Heartland ‘Oval’ is still being made (in fact in Michigan) today, for the mere sum of $7,000.00 or more. The stove I bought was from when the company was located in Canada (Elmira Stove Works). When the company was sold and relocated to Michigan, they ‘re-engineered’ the Oval such that trying to obtain replacement parts would be a huge and expensive crap shoot. Ask me how I know. Most of these modern day stoves are made of a lot of thin gauge sheet metal that just disintegrates over the years and thin cast iron that is poorly fitted and likely to warp. That Baker’s Pride from Lehman’s would be a much better bet. I can also recommend D&S Stoves here in Pa. They are Amish and make a good product for a reasonable price. They ain’t purty, but are made primarily from heavy plate with a simple efficient design. They just don’t make a cookstove at this time.

My brother got one of these for his cabin in the Missouri ozarks.
It is smaller and lighter than your average cookstove. The ‘sheet metal’ is just that, very light. There is no ‘caulking’ around the doors, joints, etc. so it is very smokey. Wood must be cut smaller to fit in the firebox. It will cook ok, best done outdoors or on a porch due to the smoke. I don’t know if lips for gaskets can be welded on, but stove gaskets are pricey for the ammount needed. He went cheap and used furnace cement to seal it up as good as he could. It looks bad, but helps. It can warm up his little 8×8 cabin, but must be refueled often as it is NOT air tight and burns quickly.
Just a warning, you get what you pay for.