Energy & Cooking
Cut fuel spend and smoke exposure with stoves and fuels you can build and feed locally. These designs come out of the efficient-combustion community, where measured fuel savings — not guesses — decide which design wins.
Making fuel from waste? Start with the briquette chainNine linked plans — char kiln, presses, drying rack and stoves — in build order.Open →
Insulated Brick Rocket Stove
A J-shaped combustion chamber that burns small sticks hot and nearly smoke-free, cutting cooking fuel by half or more.
Lever-Arm Charcoal Briquette Press
Press agricultural waste and charcoal dust into burnable briquettes, turning a disposal problem into cooking fuel or a product to sell.
Batch Solar Water Heater from a Salvaged Tank
A black-painted tank in a glazed, insulated box that gives hot washing water by mid-afternoon with no pump, controller or electricity.
Improved Mud Cookstove with Fuel Shelf
A moulded clay-and-sand stove with a sized combustion chamber and pot skirt that cuts firewood use by roughly a third against a three-stone fire.
Retained-Heat Basket Cooker
An insulated basket that finishes cooking beans, rice and stews off the fire, cutting fuel for long-boil foods by half or more.
Plywood Solar Box Cooker
A glazed, insulated box with a hinged reflector that reaches 120 – 150 °C and cooks a full pot of food on sunlight alone.
Floating-Drum Biogas Digester
A dung-fed digester with a floating gas holder that supplies two to three hours of cooking gas a day from a few animals' manure.
Drum Retort Charcoal Kiln
Char wood inside a sealed inner drum heated from outside, burning the smoke as fuel — far higher yield and far less smoke than an earth-mound burn.
Solar Phone Charging Bench
A small panel, charge controller and battery wired into a multi-port charging bench — reliable phone charging at home, or a shop that pays for itself in a season.
Windmill Water Pump
A multi-blade rotor on a guyed tower driving a piston pump down a shallow well — steady stock and irrigation water anywhere the wind blows most days.
TLUD Gasifier Stove
A top-lit updraft can stove that burns wood gas cleanly with a blue flame and leaves behind biochar instead of ash — cleaner cooking and a soil amendment from one burn.
Hydraulic Ram Pump
Use the shock of falling water to push a fraction of that flow far uphill — no fuel, no electricity, two moving valves, running day and night.
Pedal-Powered Generator
Mount a bicycle on a stand driving a permanent-magnet motor as a generator, and charge phones, lamps and radios with your legs when the grid and the sun are both out.
DiagramLee Hite Eco-Briquette Lever Press
The EWB-documented lever press that squeezes soaked waste paper and biomass into dense fuel briquettes — the design with real numbers behind it.
Hand-Cranked Screw Briquette Extruder
A screw auger in a tapering barrel that extrudes a continuous log of compacted biomass — higher output than a piston press once the feedstock is right.
Waste Paper & Leaf Briquettes
The simplest fuel in the library: soak waste paper and dry leaves, press by hand in a perforated tin, dry hard, and burn what would have been rubbish.
Cone Pit Biochar Kiln
A sloped-wall cone or flame-cap pit that turns crop residue and prunings into biochar with far less smoke than a smouldering pile.
DiagramRaised Biomass Drying Rack
The unglamorous rack that makes every fuel project work: raised, ventilated and shaded from rain so briquettes and firewood actually dry instead of moulding.
DiagramPacked Sawdust Tin Stove
Pack damp sawdust hard around a stick in a tin, pull the stick out, and light a stove that burns for an hour on waste from the timber yard.
Micro-Hydro Pelton Wheel
Where a stream drops ten metres or more, a spoon-bucket Pelton wheel on a penstock can run lights and charge batteries around the clock.