Mini wood-burning cookstove for a tiny house

Hello, there are two things that really motivate me about cabin living: the cabin itself and the wood stove that goes inside it.
I live in France, and there are no manufacturers of mini wood-burning cookstoves here. So I had to learn how to weld and build many prototypes to design this stove.


The customization work and the installation of the side viewing window were carried out by a friend.


The main challenge was to reduce the size of the cookstove while maintaining its cooking capabilities. For the firebox, I drew inspiration from workshop sawdust stoves, with an air intake from the top. A primary air supply also comes through the ash drawer. The stove’s output is around 4 to 6 kW.

To achieve an efficient oven with flue gases passing only over the top, I installed a terracotta bread oven floor in the lower section. It stores heat after about 30 minutes, and the oven can reach temperatures of up to 300°C.

Thanks you for reading

This is beautiful work. The tiny cabin, the wood cookstove, and the care in every detail create something really special. I honestly think the result is as inspiring as it is functional. Designing such a compact stove while keeping real cooking capacity is no small achievement. Respect — this is craftsmanship, intelligence, and soul in the same project. Thank You.

That's a beautiful stove. There's a lot more skill involved there than just welding.

Rémy,

This is a classic French beauty reminding me of "La Cité des enfants perdus" aesthetics.
Please share with us some pictures of the internals.

Thank you !

Hi Juan, The cabin is actually a wagon built by my friend, who customized the stove.


I’m including a link to a blog article that shows the full construction process : wagon building

Hi Michael, as for me, I’ve greatly shortened my story. It took no less than five years of work and more than 150 stoves to reach this result. I built my first stove for my converted shipping container; people saw it on my blog and asked if I could make one for them, and everything followed from there.
My first attempt here and the original tutorial : Mini stove DIY


Hi Cristobal, you're right, there is kind of Jean Pierre Jeunet aesthetics on this stove.





The last picture is from an another similar stove without customizing. For an efficient oven you need a thick terracotta, this one is 30x30x5cm and about 10kg. And The height of the oven should not be too great.
I made a short Youtube video of the last stove but it's only in french :

I also made this one with this sort of design :

Remy, a timely and singular display of skill and invention, thank you for restoring my faith in humanity.

When global kindness is absent, and oil wells are burning afar,  your work truly made my day  

These are awesome! Do you have a way to commission these? Or buy blueprints to try to build our own? Im building a yurt and want something slightly more mobile then a RMH and these are a great idea while being beautiful and inspiring!  

Thank you all for your compliments!

Hi Sam, I’m the creator of these wood stoves, so yes, it is possible to order them. However, I live in France, so it might be a bit complicated to ship the stove to you. My website :webpage

I have also designed a small rocket stove cooker with a power output of 4 kW.


I made a complete tutorial to build it yourself — it’s in French, but there are lots of photos. It’s also possible to retain some heat by placing bricks on the cooking surface once you’ve finished cooking : DIY mini rocket stove tutorial

I can also recommend this video tutorial, which is similar to the stoves I make :

These are great Rémy - thank you so much for sharing! I'm interested in those terracotta oven blocks, I'll have to find out more about those not sure how easy they would be to find in the UK. I could see one of these little stoves being a useful backup cooking device, even in a 'normal' house.

Note the flat iron behind the stove in the first post in the tiny cabin too....

Hi, thank you Nancy,

The bricks and terracotta I use come from the Raujolles brickyard in Millau, in central France. It is pure clay certified for food contact. They also ship their products via carriers.
Raujolles bricks

Remy ~ incredible work! I’d love to see a house tour and how you decorate and operate inside your home.

You did a great job on this. It's something that's been needed for many years. You ought to look in to mass producing they would be very popular.

Thank you very much!
I manufacture the stoves in small batches. For now, they mainly help fund my workshop so I can develop new inventions.
It’s a space I share with my brother, besides the stoves, we repair or modify just about anything that comes our way

Wow stick welding I was so so happy when I got my first mig welder!

Is that a Dolmar chain saw in the back ground? If so they are good saws I have a PS7900.

Hi Larry, yes, I work with stick welding. It’s true that MIG welding is faster. I chose stick welding for its ruggedness and simplicity. Since we do repairs in the workshop, I sometimes have to weld different types of metals and a wide range of thicknesses.

Sometimes, when working on construction equipment, we have to weld outdoors. Stick welding is very practical in windy conditions because it provides good gas shielding for the weld, unlike MIG or TIG.
For the stoves, I use stick pulsed welding, it's very efficient and easiest than usual stick welding.

I think the chainsaw is an old Husqvarna or Shindaiwa. It’s a forested region, and I have quite a nice collection of them in for repair! Dolmar is pretty good too.

That's a great little stove! I'll show it to my brother (he built my current heating stove....).

Here is another tiny house cook stove solution - it was designed for a VERY small living space on a boat, and they say it does heat the space adequately, too. I'll post a link to the video (it's number 6 in a series), but all they did was take one of those round camping rocket stoves, put a heat-proof surface under it, and built a shallow metal box that fits over the top of the rocket stove (I think there's a collar on the bottom of the box). On the top of the shallow box there's a collar for the flue. So they are able to cook on top of the little rocket stove without getting smoke in the house. No oven, but one of the folding camping ovens should work on top of the cook surface.  

The little wood stove can be seen up close starting at about five and a half minutes into the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BST4OvpkW2M&t=1s

Hi Kathleen, thank you very much for your message, the video is great. The modification of the EcoZoom stove is very clever, and this model of geared pruning shears are fantastic for preparing firewood.
At one point, I tried to make the smallest wood-burning cookstove possible, and I built this model which, despite its tiny size, includes an oven:

Rémy LaCabaneFieutée wrote:Hi Larry, yes, I work with stick welding. It’s true that MIG welding is faster. I chose stick welding for its ruggedness and simplicity. Since we do repairs in the workshop, I sometimes have to weld different types of metals and a wide range of thicknesses.

Sometimes, when working on construction equipment, we have to weld outdoors. Stick welding is very practical in windy conditions because it provides good gas shielding for the weld, unlike MIG or TIG.
For the stoves, I use stick pulsed welding, it's very efficient and easiest than usual stick welding.

I think the chainsaw is an old Husqvarna or Shindaiwa. It’s a forested region, and I have quite a nice collection of them in for repair! Dolmar is pretty good too.

I have found the Mig works better for me and I've welded stainless and cast iron with it along with a handful of steel types. I can weld 1/2 material with a single pass and 1 inch with a pass on both sides. For welding in the wind  I use flux core wire. I even have some that's got galvanization. I must have ten different types of wire including hardfacing! I have a Lincoln  175HD 220V I run it on a 5kw generator when I need it since I live off grid.

Oh, that's lovely. Nicely done!

I cooked and heated with a little sheepherder's stove for about 12 years. Pretty similar, except its flue went all the way around the oven (there was a valve to control this) which not only captured significantly more heat into the room, it also made for nice even baking. (The bottom flue under the oven also had a cleanout access, since it tended to fill up with ash. If I were designing it from scratch, there'd be bigger access for that cleanout.)

I need to replace the woodstove that came with my present house (it doesn't draw worth a hoot and mostly smokes up the house) and now you've got me thinking... it only really needs to heat one room, and it would be nice to have that cooking capacity.  So a tiny cookstove might be just the ticket.

Rez Zircon wrote:Oh, that's lovely. Nicely done!

I cooked and heated with a little sheepherder's stove for about 12 years. Pretty similar, except its flue went all the way around the oven (there was a valve to control this) which not only captured significantly more heat into the room, it also made for nice even baking. (The bottom flue under the oven also had a cleanout access, since it tended to fill up with ash. If I were designing it from scratch, there'd be bigger access for that cleanout.)

I need to replace the woodstove that came with my present house (it doesn't draw worth a hoot and mostly smokes up the house) and now you've got me thinking... it only really needs to heat one room, and it would be nice to have that cooking capacity.  So a tiny cookstove might be just the ticket.

Sounds more like a chimney issue.

Once I did run across one that was put together incorrectly and only burned the first few inches of whatever you put in it. I  fixed and rebuilt it and have been using it for about twelve years now, maybe longer. It had significant damage from heating and over heating in one spot only from whoever owned it before me. It was one of the iron stoves from China that bolted together I took it apart straightened out the metal and fixed the divider inside that was in the wrong place welded it together and have been using it since. It's one of the better looking stoves I've seen, has some really cool embossing a cabin and mountain scene.

Hi Larry, I agree with you about the possibilities of semi-automatic welding. Flux-cored wire welding is a very versatile technique that I recommend to many people who want to practice welding. Logically, I should be using a MIG process to build my stoves, but I have a very personal attachment to stick welding and its old-fashioned charm.

Thanks for the compliment, Rez. Yes, in my initial designs I had considered routing the flue gases all the way around the oven. I chose a different approach because of the difficulty of cleaning and to keep the stove compact.
By using my terracotta hearth, it’s possible to put in a pizza just 30 minutes after lighting the fire, and the cooking takes about 20 minutes. Terracotta really helps simplify setup and improves ease of use for wood-fired cookstoves, at least for smaller models.

Hello, I’m sharing the continuation of my thoughts and experiences with mini wood-burning cookstoves.
One detail of great importance in a tiny house is that the volume to be heated is extremely small. As a result, cooking over a wood fire is generally only practical in winter or during the transitional seasons. I find this problematic if the goal is to remain as self-sufficient as possible and use wood year-round.



I chose to miniaturize a cookstove to bring its weight down to 40 kg. It can therefore be moved outdoors by one or two people, making it possible to cook outside in summer. Of course, having both an indoor and an outdoor kitchen would be simpler, but most requests for my stoves involve mobile applications and therefore require versatility and minimalism.



This model has an adjustable output of 3 to 5 kW, the oven reaches 320°C, the cooktop measures 22 × 45 cm, and the oven contains two terracotta bricks providing a surface of 22 × 22 cm. Although smaller, it heats up faster than the stove described in my first post.

larry kidd wrote:

Rez Zircon wrote:
I need to replace the woodstove that came with my present house (it doesn't draw worth a hoot and mostly smokes up the house)

Sounds more like a chimney issue.

The flue is way too big for the stove and the available air intake. Even leaving the nearby door hanging open doesn't help all that much. It also tends to go out unless the fire is big enough to cook you, and even then it wants to back-smoke. There is no damper or other obstacles, and the chimney is plenty tall enough, it's just not designed with the proportions right. I never had such problems in 20 years of heating with four other woodstoves (one was actually a fullsized cookstove, how I loved that stove!)

Here I have natural gas heat, so a woodstove is not really necessary, more like nice to have.

This one will go out in the yard and get used for something like making charcoal out of all  the branches the scrub elms like to throw at us. Or maybe it would make a nice pizza oven, or trash burner. :D

Rez, before you toss the culprit out, try a remedy that's worthy.

Rez, don't give up, before you toss the culprit out, try a remedy. If your stove is 6 inch and the glue is 8, for example, run single wall 6 inch pipe halfway up, or a bit longer.  Then I devised insulation with superwool, blocking off the airspace at top and bottom.  Worked on one project, hope it helps you

Rico Loma wrote:Rez, don't give up, before you toss the culprit out, try a remedy. If your stove is 6 inch and the glue is 8, for example, run single wall 6 inch pipe halfway up, or a bit longer.  Then I devised insulation with superwool, blocking off the airspace at top and bottom.  Worked on one project, hope it helps you

I've thought about that, but the stove is too big for the space to heat anyway, and at this point the flue lining needs to be replaced. Also, the stove has a flap thing that apparently is meant to replace the old-type flue damper and will restrict it by about half, but it doesn't help -- it just can't keep up enough draft to function properly.

And if I do this, I'd really like to have one that's more functional as a cookstove.

It may never happen (natural gas makes one lazy, plus this house can almost scrape by with NO heat if it has to -- in Montana!) but when I see a super nice little stove like this one, I sure begin thinking about it again. :D