Today I wanted to cook my food.
Nothing particularly creative about that. However, I wanted to do it with stuff I found in my recycling bin.
Well, mostly. I found THREE tin cans. Some scrap cardboard. I also needed a paperclip and some oil.
As you can tell I started with nothing of any particular value. Of course you may value tin cans more valuable than most people however, I typically see people putting cardboard and empty cans in the recycle bins.
First up: The Sardine can
In my first design I just used a bunch of cardboard and oil inside the mandarin orange tin. Got a gigantic flame, much too big to cook with. So. I decided to put a smaller can inside to take up space and hold the cardboard in place. Great idea but it liked to float on top of the oil. A hole in the top and bottom of the can and no more problem. It sat nicely inside the mandarin orange tin.
Next: The wick.
Now in order to burn the oil I needed a wick to draw up the oil in the mandarin orange can. Cardboard was easily available and made an OK (but not great) wick. It was wrapped around the sardine can and then placed in the mandarin orange can. The cardboard had to be above the oil (if submerged the flame went out) so I used the paperclip to adjust the cardboard up or down to get a good flame.
The Mandarin orange can.
Pretty basic. Just a can which I filled up partway with canola oil. Canola oil won't burn with a match but if wicked up with cardboard it will just like a candle burning wax.
Assemble the pieces for the burner.
All assembled the burner unit looked like this. Pretty ugly to be certain however:
It makes a nice flame with very little smoke. Now I say little because there is certainly still a bit of smoke. Similar to what you would get from a candle. Far more than you would get with a propane stove but far less than you would get with a three stone wood fire.
Now at this point I knew I had enough heat coming off to cook something but nothing to place my pot onto.
Cooking Support can
I got a large can and removed the top and bottom. This would serve as a support for my pot and the oil burner would be placed inside. However, if there is no airflow the fire inside will go out very quickly. I had to make sure there was an air intake on the bottom and a place for the hot air to escape on the top. Solution...make a cut on both the top and the bottom as shown below.
Now to get to cooking.
I assembled all the pieces. Lit the burned and then placed the cooking support can around it.
Start the fire
Place can to support my pot around the fire.
Then it was time to cook the ravioli from the can. Sure I could have done something better...but I had to do something with the ravioli that was in the can.
7 minutes later I checked that it was getting warmer.
and I checked that the fire was still going strong inside.
22 minutes the Ravioli was bubbling away nicely. It was probably ready earlier but I got tied up playing Clash Royale on my phone🤣
Ready just in time for lunch!
Now this was a very VERY crude stove just made as a proof of concept. Yes you can build a fire using cooking oil and garbage. The wick adjustment wasn't very good. The distance from burner to flame needed adjustment. In short, it proved that you can cook with oil but not that this is a great burner.
If I was to redo the experiment I'd probably want to try using USED MOTOR OIL. It should burn just as well as cooking oil and it is often given away for free to be recycled. If I could take waste motor oil and cook with it then I could cook using truly nothing but trash.
Overall this burner was not as clean as using either a butane burner or propane burner. However, looking at fuel prices (in Canada):
Propane $9.99 / 1lb (21,600 BTU)
Butane $4.99 / 200g (4,440 BTU)
Canola oil $3 / 1 liter (35,700 BTU)
A quick look shows that canola oil costs the least of the fuels and has more energy to release when cooking food. As such it would be a less expensive fuel to cook with.
Wood may be even cheaper but I don't have a cost for firewood here. As there are 43,000sqkm of forest fires burning in Canada right now (about the size of all of Switzerland or Belgium) open fires and burning are banned! Stories just hit of one lady hit with a $29,000 fine for ignoring the open fire ban.
Which is why I'm making an oil fire from cans not a wood fire from tin cans
Regardless 1lb of firewood = about 6000btu. So, roughly 6lbs or 2.5kg of wood will equal 1 liter of oil but typical campfire is only about 20% efficient with 80% lost as smoke. That means 30lbs of firewood needs to be burned for every 1 liter of cooking oil.
The three stone fire uses a lot of wood and makes a lot of smoke.
I read an article (I think from @jjmusa2004) about not condemning poor people for using a three stone fire until there was a cheap alternative. I took that as a challenge to see how cheap I could make an alternative.
This stove isn't great and the oil certainly isn't free. However, if using spent motor oil and if the design is refined to make it more elegant I believe it could be :
- Very cheap to produce
- Very cheap to operate
- With much less smoke to affect the users health.
It is NOT a clean alternative and electricity is far cleaner and easier. However, at least this is a step in the right direction.
Now regarding electricity:
1Kwh of Electricity is about 3400BTU so 10Kwh of electricity is equal to about 1l of oil. In Canada 10Kwh is about $1.50 so half the price of cooking with oil. Luckily in Canada electricity is reliable so paying half price for a cleaner and easier solution makes an oil stove pretty silly.
I've heard that the electricity isn't always as reliable in other countries though. Electric cookstoves can also cost a lot of money.
Now you have seen what a FREE(ish) cooking alternative looks like.
Thanks for reading.