Stoves

What do you do when you’re trying to get a reluctant campfire going? You blow on it, of course, to fan the flames. Montreal’s SolHuma Inc. has taken that same idea, and applied it to its VitalGrill camp stove. The portable device burns whatever combustible material can be loaded into it – no special fuels are required – and incorporates a small battery-powered fan that “supercharges” the flames to produce up to 20,000 BTUs of heat.  Read More

The 180 Stove is a simple, portable backpacking stove that relies on wood as its sole fuel. Unlike gas canisters and liquid propane, wood is a natural fuel that's available in all types of wilderness areas, making it a renewable, clean source of fuel for backwoods cooking. And since there are no canisters to buy, carry and dispose of, you save weight and space in your pack.  Read More

Chances are that even if you own a propane camp stove, you’ve tried cooking over an open fire at least once. When you did, despite your best efforts, you probably ended up sucking down a lot of smoke in the process. Now, imagine doing that for every meal. For many women in the developing world, breathing in toxic smoke while cooking over a wood, kerosene or coal fire is part of their daily routine. Not only can it have a detrimental effect on their own health, but it also worsens local air pollution and (in the case of wood fires) deforestation. The Eco Fire Pot Stove, however, is designed to allow these women to cook while breathing clean air.  Read More

Consider the humble camping stove. It requires fuel - perhaps some unwieldy bottle that air carriers object strongly to. Maybe it needs batteries to run a fan, or billows out smoke so you smell like smoked sweatshirt for the rest of the trip. The solution might be the BioLite stove - it's a collapsible wood-burning cook stove that uses almost any forest-found fuel and converts its own heat energy into electricity to achieve efficient combustion with ultra-low emissions.  Read More

Two years ago experts began work on a revolutionary new stove that could help reduce poverty in third world countries. The £2m SCORE project (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) was designed to offer cooking, refrigeration and energy production from a wood-powered generator and subsequent developments have now brought the project to a point where it can be mass-produced.  Read More

Cooking might be a chore or a pleasure, depending on your culinary proficiency. But what's out of your hands is how much room you have to prepare your culinary feast. If there's barely elbow room to stir your pots and pans, then this funky looking roll-up stove-top from Italian designer Maurizio Maiorana - called the Cooka – might be just the extra hand you need. The design resembles a yellow table mat and is made from a non-toxic, liquid silicone rubber that can be rolled up and easily stored once you've finished cooking with it.  Read More

June 28, 2006 The best inventions are invariably the simplest, easiest to understand and those that clearly offer a solution to an important problem – inventions that the moment you see them make you wish you’d thought of them, and are so obvious that you believe you might just have done so under the right circumstances. The Simmer Stove fits the bill for such an invention and works by lowering the cooking pot into the benchtop, significantly reducing the chances of the pot being pulled or knocked off the stove and taking the heat source well away from human hands. The safety aspects seem to pale beside the confinement of the heat source which prevents heat loss to the atmosphere and significantly reduces the energy needs of the stove. Given that stoves have been with us forever … we just can’t undertand why has it taken this long to do the obvious. Romy Hockley conceived Simmer Stove and is seeking partners to develop the concept.  Read More