The Amazing $500 Wood-burning Stove ... That You Can Build for $35 (or Less!)

Image Gallery There's no shortage of old electric water heaters in most of this country's landfills and dumps. MOTHER staffer Clarence Goosen contemplates all the groovy woodburners he'll be able to make from one morning's haul of junked water heater tanks. The sparks fly as Robert Smyers converts an old water heater into a stove. Drawing shows general details of ""water heater tank to wood-burning stove"" conversion.

(Note: Since this article was published in 1978, building codes and homeowners insurance rules have changed, and federal rules governing wood stoves have been adopted. This stove design may not comply with various federal and local regulations. Readers are advised to check with appropriate officials before installing this stove in their homes. —Mother)

Most homebuilt wood-burning stoves are scabbed together from old 55-gallon drums. And they more or less do the job they're supposed to do ... despite the fact that they're notoriously inefficient users of fuel, are difficult to regulate, rapidly burn through, and are so ugly that most people will only tolerate them out in the garage or workshop.

Perhaps the single really good thing that can be said for the majority of the 55-gallon-drum burners is that (usually) it doesn't cost very much to put one of them together or at least it didn't used to. Here lately, though, the steel barrels have become increasingly difficult to find ... and, when you do locate one of the containers, it frequently has a seven dollar price tag at fixed to it.

There must be a better way to go about assembling a homemade wood-burning stove. And there is' As MOTHER was recently shown by Wilton, Iowa's Robert Wars (who, incidentally, just happens to be the brother of MOTHER researcher Emerson Smyers).

"Forget about messing around with old 55-gallon drums," Bob told us. "What you want to build your stove out of is a discarded electric water heater tank ... for at least four good reasons:

"In the first place, the walls of such a tank are a minimum of three to four times as thick as the metal in a 55-gallon barrel ... which means that a water heater drum will make a much tougher stove that will last a lot longer.

"Second, when you build a firebox from a junked water heater tank, it's very easy to make the stove as airtight and efficient as any $500 woodburner on the market. And I can't say that about any 55-gallon-drum stove I've ever seen.

"Third, if you construct your heater the way I tell you to, it'll be easy to load, it will have excellent fire and temperature control, and it'll look classy enough to put on display right in the living room.

"And fourth, you can build one of my 'water heater' stoves for even less than most folks now spend putting together a 55gallon-barrel wood-burner. As a matter of fact, I scrounged up everything that went into mine. Which means that the stove cost me only the laborone good long daythat I used building it."