Please visit “Provitaz” here:

The cook top is not superfast in this construction because the fire draws quickly in to the bakeoven. But it works ok when you have a good load of wood. But it dosent work with small amounts of wood. Better not be your only way to cook food for a lot of people as you might want a more effecient dedicated heater for making food where you dont nead to fill the burnchamber to make some food. The heat exchange with the coocktop is the issue. Mabe it is better if I had real cast Iron?? Mabe it is also better on Chernovs original design? But the way this works you can only cook well when you burn a good amount of wood.

It is in my opinion not a great construction for making lots of food anyway since there is only one or two small kettles that can go on it. So it is not sufficient for families here, and the way they like to make food and tea all the time!!But mabe for you it is fine if you can schedule making food to twice a day when you fill it with wood.  I hope to modify this in a future design.

The baking oven works great! It heats awesome. Hope this helps someone to build this fantastic heater !!

• Small mass (300 kg) with quick response (sunny days in the winter can get quite warm and heating a big mass is not always desiered) It can be put on a wood floor without reinforcements.
• Instant heat.  It can throw off a signifficant amount of heat directly from the coocktopp. This heat comes instantly after the fire is going.
• Effecient for cooking. The coocktop is ready in two minutes! It boiled 3 liters of water in 12 minutes.
• Burnchamber suitable for baking one bread after burn. Grills can be done on the coals to.
• Clean-effecient burn with secondary air provided in the back.
• Movable ( it can be carried by four men or slided on the floor to be put in a corner of the room for the summer)
• Cheap! This stove costs 35 azn  in materials, that is less than 50 $. It can be builded in one day!
• Chimney temperature is low, but increases significantly if you burn it more than 1-2 hours. Mabe it can be completed with a bench to extract more heat.
• Works with the standard 4″ chimney that they use here.
• It can be suited with a small water-heatexchanger.

The family that are testing it lives in a mountain village where the winter is hard. They are reporting that it so far works great, heats much better than their old stove, uses significantly less wood, burns cleaner. It hardly neads any atention to continue burning. It is much better to cook on. It dosent nead to be cleaned often ( the old stove neaded chimeny sweep every month!) The draft is much better ,the door can be opened for fire gazing (and provide light when the electric is gone) It retains the heat pretty much through the night and leave some glowing coals to the morning so it is easy to light it up again. It makes the room dryer as it is provided with a more stable heat-source   It will last longer before they nead to change it. We would say 10 years with minor maintainance.

There are different conciderations that make us to do things differently here than back home, to point out some:

1. Different general expectations to qualities of products. (If a heater here lasts 20 years it is 20 times better than the local heaters that burn hole in them through one heating season)
2. The desire to make things available for everyone. Economy is bad, and making a heater that costs 10 000 azn is never going to help anyone
3. Reproducable. We work only with  what can be found localy, we dont want to make ourselves a bottle neck by implementing feks. Imported Cast Iron that only we know how to get.
4. We want things to be safe, but regulations for fireplaces here are not enforced/existent, so we can to a larger degree use comon sence and do what make sence in different cases.
5. Implementation of local knowledge. We like to honor the local culture by implementing good ideas from their own inherited knowledge. In this way our products makes more sence
6. Usage of  local made products provides work instead of competing with local products.

Some examples:

Local made doors: These doors will last mabe 5-10 years. Cast-Iron lasts mabe 100. But the Cast Iron is unavailable and we would have to import it ourselves.By making a local cheap product (5 azn) we provide work to the people that are currently making the stoves that everyone are using. And we avoid becoming the bottle-neck in implementing the technology localy. If you can get beautifull Cast Iron doors and can afford it. Thats what I would do at home !!

Bricks with holes: These are localy made bricks, they are not perfectly shaped and they have holes in them that nead to be filled.This can be done if you can fill them with the same type of mud that the bricks are made from. If not there will be difference in expanding and you will have airpockets inside that will effect the heaters performance and may lead to cracking. There is no reason to do this if you can get solid bricks made for stovebuilding where you live!

Burnchamber liner made of wool-clay mix: This is a local tradition that is used for making the local Tendir bread ovens. It is proven to work well through centuries of traditions. It is fun to adapt this to our heaters and see that it is very crack resistant and pleasing to work with. It makes the fire burn really hot because wool dosent loose its insulative value when it is soked ! Proof is in the pudding, this is a great idea. But it lasts only some years and then you might nead to do repairs. Offcource a burn chamber made of firebrick (chamote) is stronger, but it is also 20 times more expensive, and less carbon neutral.

I like this heater, because it is small and cheap to build and heats one normal sized uninsulated room in Azerbaijan. And it has a quite effective small cooktop that also can have a door for doing small bakeries.

If floor structures are up to EU-standards it can go on top of a wooden floor. (remember to use some type of insulative bricks at the bottom.) In this case we had to strengthen the structure, because it was a weaker structure.

The black spots above the door are because of the draft was a little insufficient in the beginning when it was wet. When the stove dried up it was just ok. But it is connected to a 1,5 m 10cm diameter horizontal uninsulated flue, then a 90 degree elbow that brings it up just 1,5 meters.  From the bottom to the top of the chimney it is less than three meters. So it is quite impressive that it is burning nicely now !. We are now planning for a better chimney, to have cold start up being easier.

The owner agreed to take notes on its performance, so we will have some data on how it works in reality after the winter. For now, read this article to learn how dual fuel hvac systems work. And if you’re having issues with your heating system, you may contact a professional service that offers residential heater repair services. Also, make sure to contact a professional heat pump repair service to ensure proper air circulation. Then for cooling systems, you will need to call an ac repair contractor indianapolis. Schedule an appointment with HVAC techs for professional ac maintenance services. Torn between ac unit vs heat pump? Click the link if you want additional info on which one you should choose. For professional ac repair and maintenance services, make sure to hire the experts.

We used:

about 570 red bricks 100$

10 sacks of mud !! Free 0$

3 sacks of sand     9$

50 used firebricks 30$

2 local made doors 10$

1 local made cook-top and damper 30$

Chimney: 50$

It took us 10 days to finish the whole process with means a local could build it for around 200$ In sum that makes a local business  able to install a heater like this for about 430$ . Thats pretty impressive when you think of that this heater might last a lifetime !

I will soon publish drawings and more pictures. But first I want to test it more. If you are trying to build from my drawings I don’t take any responsibility for the outcome, and I strongly recommend to do a workshop before you try it.

I just wanted to post some picture on the ongoing project in Lerik. We are making a multipurpose stove for cooking, baking and heating. The total mass will be about 2,5 tonns and max heat output is estimated to 3,5 kw. The stove is very much inspired by the “Russian rocket” builded by Alex Chernov at the Masonry Heater Associations annual meating 2012. I did not have any drawings but made the construction drawings in “scetch up” my self from scratch, just looking at the pictures available here: and I used the knowledge I had after finishing the workshop with Ekonmka. It is changed in some areas because of us having different sized bricks and also according to the customers needs. And we are using only local made bricks , local made doors, mud from the field next door etc. Total price for the materials are around 200$ !!!

The family, specially the women are all really exited because they realize the potential of heating their house almost only on the wood they would before use to bake bread, and they are also exited of the possibility of fresh bread every day, not having to leave the house and go out to the Tendir in half a meter of snow!! This family is now really looking forward to the winter, and offcource this heater was builded on our expence and the man in the picture recieve training in building it himself. Hopefully he will take this work futher in his village and make a living out of the training.

When we have tested it, that it is really burning well and working ok, I will share the drawings here for free for anyone that is interested.

PS!! Any malfunction on this construction will be my responsability. This is not an exact copy of Alex Chernov`s stove and it may perform differently.

One pound of dry wood releases about  8,600 btu’s of energy when burned. Gasoline
is only about twice as concentrated. It took a long time for the tree to grow. The daily
amount of sunlight was captured and changed into chemical energy. In fact, trees
are very much like batteries, storing energy. Wood is like a battery that has been storing
energy for decades. The energy is concentrated and ready for use at any rate, depend-
ing on need. Also, this “battery” does not lose its charge while sitting, cannot spill acid on
your pants, and usually smells good!

Burning wood or any biomass also has a great advantage over burning petroleum products. Trees absorb carbon dioxide while growing and release the same amount when burned. The tree reduces the amount of C02 in the atmosphere and then replaces it. Burning fossil fuels, made from plants millions of years old, can only increase the amount of atmospheric C02, since absorption done by
the plants happened so long ago. Burning biomass does not increase the amount of C02
in the atmosphere in the same way that burning petroleum can.

What about deforestation?

Deforestation due in part to fuel needs
represents a major threat to ecosystems in
many developing countries. Obviously, the
answer to threatened forests is to grow trees
at a faster rate than forest products are con-
sumed. Wood can then be used at a sustain-
able rate, where less is taken than produced.
Taking a greater amount insures a diminished
resource and, if the trend continues, an even-
tual loss. Many countries in the world will
run out of wood, long before they run out of
gasoline and oil! (But eventually oil will be out aswell)

 Cook your food on growing trees

 If you’ve got it, in rural areas wood is a
powerful, convenient source of fuel.
By using wood efficiently, people can cook
food using branches and twigs instead of split
logs. Gathering fallen branches can bring
people firewood without killing the trees, if
the rate of use matches the resource. The
branches are already a handy size so people
can be spared the labor of splitting logs as
well. The trees continue to grow while people
cook with wood.

This text is manly extracted from the book “Capturing HEAT” by Dean Still and Jim Kness