@sirenahippie: This solution is great, and as you say, it’s inexpensive. You’re making the most of your resources—which is a good thing—so you won’t be cold this winter. Best regards!
Dugout Shelter Stove by @cahlen on 3Speak
Rather than building a wood stove as I had planned, I decided to go with a simple and inexpensive propane stove to heat the dugout shelter this Winter. --- ▶ Watch on 3speak.tv
Tags: #homesteading #diy #survival #prepping #minimalism #life #lifestyle #technology
Hey everyone, Callan here, and it's morning time here in the dugout shelter, and I want to show you the stove that I'm using to keep warm and to cook while I'm in here. But first of all, I want to talk a little bit about the type of stove it is and why I decided not to use a wood stove. So I was planning to build a wood stove out of all the fire bricks that we have student across the property. with some refractory mortar which I bought, but I came to conclusion I didn't really want to risk the chance of a fire, because in order to put the chimney through the structure, you need to have some very specific things. And I could, like, make some makeshift. things, you know, basically you need to have your stove pipe, which goes up, and the stove pipe gets very hot. It goes up or goes out through the wall, but it needs to have another pipe, which has airspace between it, so that that heat never actually touches the wood, okay? So I do have things I could make that out of, but then I would have to worry about getting the roof back to being waterproof, and I just decided that really, if I'm going to put in a wood stove, I should wait until I have the ability to actually buy some good parts, you know, parts that are really made for that for a legitimate fireplace. So I'm just going to go with propane. And propane is something which I have used a lot in the past. Propane is extremely effective at heating a space, especially when you line it with this aluminum. insulation. So when I lived in a yurt a long time ago, I lined the whole thing in insulation, I've any videos about this, and I was able to heat it from freezing degrees outside to 70 in the 70s, okay? And I'm able to do that in here, even more effectively because it's a much smaller space. Now, the problem with propane is that it... Of course, it will make carbon monoxide, but it's only going to make carbon monoxide in a situation where the air is all used up. So if you have air constantly, or the oxygen is all used up, excuse me. But if you have an air coming into the shelter and you have a place for that air to exit, then that the concentration of oxygen in the air is never going to get so low that it makes carbon monoxide, okay? So the exhaust of burning propane is carbon dioxide. which is carbon with two oxygens and water. Okay, so those are both very good things. People think that, you know, propane is the pollutant, it's not. You know, water's not bad, carbon dioxide is not bad. In fact, we are at a low point in our atmosphere for carbon dioxide. If we had more carbon dioxide, we would be able to grow plants and forests much more effectively, okay? But anyways, if the auction gets low, that's when you're going to get carbon monoxide, so you do you need to be careful about that. So I do have a carbon monoxide detector up on the wall there. And the other problem that you have to worry about is moisture because, again, one of the exhaust of it is water. And so if you're running this all day long in a shelter that doesn't have a place for water to get out, you're going to have water running down your walls. And I don't want this in this shelter because it's made out of wood. and black mold is extremely bad for you, okay? So, I tend to just run this thing for, you know, short periods of time, or at very low, so that it never gets to that point, and so far I have not seen any condensation on the walls. Okay, so let's actually take a look at the stove. All right, so as you can see, I have my propane tank back here, and I have lined the walls with some metal. but I don't even know if this is necessary, just in case it gets too hot, but these never even really get hot to the touch, so I'm not sure if they're really necessary. There's this little stove, it's like a $25 propane stove, which I'll show you, I'll take these off and show you, but this is really all you need, actually this is more than I need, and then I have a propane tank back here, and this thing is about $20 to refill at the local hardware store. Okay, and it will probably last several weeks of me running it almost constantly. Okay, so these are some of the fire brakes I was going to build the fireplace out of. I just put them on top. These are a little bit hot because I've been running in a few minutes. Oh, and also I have this big metal. I don't know what this is for. It looks like it was covering some sort of machinery at one point. It also will hold heat, okay? So you maybe can't see the flame. Oh, the flame just went out. Okay, so, here I'll show you me lighten it. There you go. And so I can cook on here. If I, at some point I'll probably get a cast iron skillet or a Dutch oven and I'll cook on here. And there are two fire bricks down below this, and these actually get pretty warm. And then I put fire bricks on the front. the back and the side, and I would put one here, but this is where the valve is, so I don't want anything touching that, okay? So basically, when I want it to use it as a stove to heat the place, I just place them on here. And if I'm just using, like right now, all I have for cooking stuff is my titanium water bottle and the little mug or small pot that goes with it. So I just fill these with water. and I set them on that, and I can use this to make coffee or my oatmeal or whatever. Like, just this by itself is all that I need. I don't need to put it directly on the flame. But if I did want to put it directly on the flame, I just move these to the side a little bit. Ow, it's hot. And I put this right there, and it gets hot within like five minutes. So what I do, if I want to use the stove to heat up the shelter, I will turn this on, and I will turn on high, and it's basically on high right now. And once these get hot, which they already are, I will, here, let me move this over here. You see, that's kind of a high flame there. I will turn down the flame until basically is total minimum, until it's just about to go out. valve is a little bit touchy and then I'll just leave it there the whole day long and these will stay super hot and they'll be radiating heat all day long and they'll be bouncing off the walls and the ceiling, the heat, the infrared will be bouncing around inside the shelter and also I've started putting rocks in just to hold a little extra heat so all along the sides of the shelter I've got rocks on the bottom level. So here's the temperature outside on top of my roof. And here's the temperature inside. And it was, when I woke up this morning, I did not run the heat last night. It was 53 degrees in here. And this stove has only been running for about 10 minutes. So like I was pointing out, this is an extremely cheap solution. Just like my shelter is an extremely cheap solution, most of the things that I use to build this, were free and I only spent a few hundred dollars for things like the insulation and the waterproofing plastic and the particle boards that or the OSB which is making up the roof okay and then you'll need things screws and tools of course you know and I did have a tractor which I did not buy so of course those things maybe are a little bit more expensive but anyways for me this was a very cheap solution and just like that this stove is extremely cheap it was like $25, $30 for the little stove, and then buying the propane. First, if you don't have a propane tank, that's probably going to cost you around $60 to $70 empty, and then you have to get it filled for about $20. Depends on where you are. But most hardware stores, gas stations that have like this little locked metal container outside their front door. where they do what's called propane exchange, so they have all these filled tanks in there, and you bring in a tank, and you go to the front register, and they send someone out there with you, and you give them your empty tank, and they'll give you a full tank, okay, and that usually costs about $20. So I would only recommend that for getting your tank, okay? So that's probably one of the cheaper ways to get your tank. It's going to cost you about $65, that's how much my cost. But it was, you know, roughly three-fourths full as well, so it saved me about $15. Okay, then at that point, don't continue, don't do the actual exchange, that's going to be more expensive. They don't fill the tanks all the way. Instead, find a place in your town where you can get it filled, and they're going to fill it all the way, and usually it's extremely inexpensive, okay? and where I am, I've talked about this a lot, people are very honorable, and you, like, go into stores, and you'll be looking at something, and, like, they'll tell you that, oh, you could get that in this other place in town for cheaper. So, anyways, this person who did the exchange for us was like, okay, so you bought this, but when you, when you go to get it refueled, you should go and do this instead. Now, I already knew that, but it was just kind of refreshing, you know, that I live in a place where, You know, people are so open about that kind of thing. So, anyways, that's my propane stove. I might make a wood stove, maybe next year. I'm guessing I won't have the chimney parts. Good chimney parts are fairly expensive. So I'm probably just going to stick with this for the winter. But as you can see, it's really effective and inexpensive. It's super easy. I mean... You don't have to have fire brakes, you just have bricks, or you could even stack rocks on top of this type of thing. So getting the stove and getting the propane tank is all you really need, okay? Another thing about wood stove is that you have to process the firewood. Firewood, if you buy it can be fairly expensive, you have to have a place to stack it. You have to stack it, right? It's a lot of work, even if you're not chopping it all yourself, and if you are, way more work, right? So propane is convenient, but the problem with propane is that if services ever go down or these type of products become extremely expensive because of things like wars and all that type of stuff, then it's not as great, okay? So for a totally off-grid solution, then firewood is probably a better option, okay, because all you're going to need is a chainsaw. Well, I guess you would need gas to run the chainsaw, but there are a waste of buckwood without a chainsaw. and you'll need an axe, okay, of course you'll need a source of firewood and a way to move it, which of course would take gas too, so really, you know, I'm kind of leaning towards just sticking with propane, but we'll see how it goes. So anyways, that's my stove for the dugout shelter. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys later.
@sirenahippie: This solution is great, and as you say, it’s inexpensive. You’re making the most of your resources—which is a good thing—so you won’t be cold this winter. Best regards!
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