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It's been two weeks I've been off the radar due to a nasty virus who kept me in bed for many days. My throat is still sore and I'm coughing all day long but at least today I'm not feeling weak or dizzy like previously. Today the weather was rather warm and we wanted to have a little BBQ in the backyard. I've been wanting to build a rocket stove for a while already but never got around to build one. I've been experimenting with several designs.

The 20 brick design

This one is the most popular brick rocket stove you can find on Youtube. You start with a concrete slat on top of which you set the bricks into an upside down U made of three and a half brick. The channel in the centre will be where you feed the stove with wood and the inside will be the burning chamber.

You then lay three or four layers made of four bricks leaving a middle chimney that connects to the bottom channel.

As the wood burns in the chamber, the flames will create a hot air that will be pushed up the chimney creating a sucking action drawing fresh air (oxygen) from the front of the channel. Heat will thus fly upward in the chimney and you can cook on the top of the chimney. For that, you would set four little pebbles on the top of the chimney and set a pan sitting on them.

The dual chamber design

The previous design works nicely but I don't like the fact that the wood is fed horizontally into the channel. With the following design, you feed the wood in down vertically into the first chamber, the flames are then being sucked into the channel and up into the chimney on the opposite side.

This is the design I used, I just didn't dig into the ground but set the stove right on top of it, works just as good.

The brick BBQ

Although the rocket stoves work very well, the problem is that we wanted to grill our food not cook them in a pan. Grilling on the stove means the flames are licking the food leaving a black residue on it. So I ended up making a brick BBQ instead. Doing it with bricks means I can alternate the design as many time as I want, depending on what I wanted to do. I might build a rocket stove again for boiling water for a coffee or for making fried eggs.

The coal is started in a regular starter chimney and once ready I pour it into the brick BBQ, installed a grill on it and started cooking the chicken wings.

I then set some bricks around the sides and the back in order to install a metal plate to serve as a roof that will retain a little bit more heat to cook the chicken evenly.

While waiting, I installed some chairs around an old portable BBQ converted into a fire pit to keep us warm. My son was excited and could not wait to roast his marshmallows.

The brick BBQ was installed, near the gas BBQ that don't use that often as we prefer the smell of wood fire on the meat.

Dinner is ready, our chicken wings were perfect. I set the grill rather high (2 bricks high) so that it takes a bit more time to cook, that also let enough time for the fat from the skin to leak out in order to get a crispy skin. Sorry, was too hungry and forgot to take some photos...

As we were eating the chicken I continued roasting the corn cobs, the sweet potatoes and the chestnuts.

The chestnuts were the first to be ready.

The corn and sweet potatoes took a while so we went on and roasted our marshmallows.

Finally, corn and sweet potatoes are ready and we had finished our dinner and watched a beautiful moonrise.

The photo does not do it justice but here is the moon rising on top of the hills.

What a fantastic way to end the weekend.

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• ULOG 036 - We only have one life

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Credits

• The image at the top has been generated with the Canva app using my own photo.

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