I’m helping finish a
community outdoor kitchen. We have a large 8"
rocket mass heater with a 19” diameter metal plate on top as a cook surface, that was meant to be the primary cook stove in the kitchen. It takes a very long time to heat the cook surface; we’ve never managed to boil our large 16” pot of
water on it even after running the stove all day.
It’s possible there are slight issues with some of the dimensions that could be improved to make it more efficient, and we intend to figure that out.
But my larger question is why we are trying to use rocket mass
heaters for cooking outdoors at all. Even if we made it maximally efficient, so much heat goes into the mass, and the fire itself is so far from the cook surface, that the time it takes to get the cook surface hot and the
wood consumption might be more than a typical wood cookstove, and you can't fit as many pots on this either. However, this thing is already built, so we’re trying to decide what to do with it.
Has anyone else use a
rocket mass heater as a cook stove outdoors, where you weren't getting much or any benefit from heating the mass? Or any thoughts on what we
should do here?
The original plan was to have a larger metal cooktop that you could fit six pots on, but I don't
think there's any way that would have made sense to do; the extra large cooktop acts as a radiator and doesn't get as hot.
Because it's taking up a lot of space inside the kitchen, if it's not going to be useful to cook on, we might want to tear it apart and just put a wood cook stove there instead. However, so much work went into this thing that we are reluctant to take it apart.