Homemade Hot Water Tank Stove

by Crash325
(Tucson, AZ USA)

I have had good success building near "Air Tight" wood stoves from old hot water heater tanks. This is the second year for my stove and it is fairly east to maintain 70+ to 78 Deg. most of the time. My stove is a little on the small side, so it needs a little wood every 3 to 4 hours for a long burn. Once a good bed of coals has built up it will put out heat for over 6 hours on a couple of large logs. During a couple of hard freezes a fire was maintained for over 36 hours and the house was around 75d most of the time.

My stove 14" in diameter, Mr. Pot Belly 17" and #3 20+". all are about 25" long.

I have built 2 others for friends, with minor improvements on each one. First improvement was adjustable legs to level the stove. #2 was adding a baffle at the rear of the stove.

One friend burns his like it was a "Pot Belly", like he used for a lot of years. First he gets his house 2 hot, then he smolders the rest of the wood away. He is an "Expert" on just about everything and refuses to burn his stove in a proper fashion.

I have not got a report on the #3 Stove. Will add it on when I know how well he is doing. The stove replaced what was called and sold as a "Franklin Stove". There were lots of different types of Franklin stoves. His was more of a free standing fire place than a stove.

Happy to share plans, pictures, instructions and ideas with most all of you. Email skystone at nethere dot net

Hello again Crash 325,

It is great to see you sharing so much - you obviously have some well practised fabrication skills. When I started building this site one of the sections I really want to build out was a "do it yourself stove" section, complete with plans and a collection of people's experiences building and using them.

I've held off for various reasons, but mainly because I haven't felt happy about writing that kind of information without first hand experience.
I'm not living in a place where I can work on those kind of projects but if you are keen to share more details I might just take you up on that offer (and anyone else who reads this and has a homemade stove of their own).

I'll contact you in the next 24 hours with some thoughts.

All the best,

Mike - WoodstoveWizard.com

NB I altered your email address to make it a bit harder for spammers to copy it - good practice for any web publishing