Cooking and heating with a Romanian fireplace

Heating and cooking with firewood.

Our 4 room / 50 m2 cabin in Romania is heated with only one woodstove placed in the middle and encased in the walls.Basically the smoke from the stove spirals inside the walls untill it gets up the chimney almost completely cold. The cooking fireplace is actually a Romanian one, called Gipsyes cooking stove in the popular slang, probably because gipsyes are skilled stove makers, and iron workers so they made the hot plates,the circles and the gates in the past. The one I posted pictures of was in fact made by a Romanian gipsy. I since tore it down and built myself the one that heats the entire house, it looks the same in all aspects except that is encased in the walls (the walls are hollow, maze like so the smoke goes thru about 20 yards of heat retaining brick tunnels.It is not tall atop the pizza oven is where it ends and goes inside the walls.Atop the pizza oven we now keep a big pot filled with water that is always hot to use for washing dishes or minimal hygiene.We also have a condo in the city 5 mins away where we shower and do the laundry but the kids and us prefer to stay at the cabin whenever we`re not busy.
The feeding gate of the stove stays completely closed most times,with the lower communicating gate opened just 1/2'' whenever we need a quick hot fire.It`s 20 degrees C below outside and 22+ inside with about 2 milk crates or less of wood/day .The little door to the left side is what we call the Pizza oven and is great for baking/cooking or roasts. Once the wood is fastly burned, all gates get closed and the fire will last for 8-9 hrs of course with a log or two every 3-4 hrs to sustain the fire so we won`t have to restart it in the morning. Although they cannot be seen,the stove contains +400 heat retaining bricks laid into 15-20 meters of tunnels and mortared with clay (like pottery clay) and sand but no cement so it won`t crack, which get heated up by the smoke going thru on the way to the chimney.The fireplace will keep warm 2-3 days after the fire inside is completely estinguished. The hot plate we use it to cook on or make toast on or off the direct fire by taking the circles off. We have a propane stove also but since we started heating up with wood it seems silly and sometimes inconvenient to not use the wood stove.Besides,the food tastes better,probably because it`s slow cooked. Since there is no running water available yet I didn`t bother to run a pipeline thru so I can get hot water at no cost, however is doable.
I now learned a lot about woodstoves and chimneys and I make my own, they`re lots of books out there about how to do it properly, air intake/ exhaust ratios,spiraling the smoke so you`ll get the maximum amount of heat etc. Heat is not only on the flame itself but also in the smoke so what you wanna do is capture the maximum amount of it .

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heat efficient wood stove

This is another wood burning stove that does not have a cooking plate .As you can see from the picture the air intake is minimal,and the heat has to go thru many meters of heat retaining brick tunnels.Also,for this stove to work,the door cannot be larger than the chimney, the chimney would have to rise at least 1.5 - 2 meters abot the roof top. The lower gate(door) opens to the compartment where the ashes fall from the fireplace thru a grill.During the wood burning this is the only gate that will be kept open for a fast,hot fire.After all wood wa rapidly burned all gates get closed,there will be fire for another 8 hrs.
It needs one bucket of firewood in the evening,and one in the morning to keep a 4x4x3m room 20 degrees Celsius warm in the winter.

looks pretty much the same as we used to have here in finland some decades ago...

btw, if you want new woodstove/oven having a good mason make it will save your nerves and plenty of material, it isnt easy as it looks. Trust me, i've been masons helpers often enough to know how tought it is---

Re: larger pictures

I`ve been on AS all day today mainly reading posts ,answering my pm in regards to chainsaws and shipping them to Europe and I feel too lazy to do any browsing for larger pictures.My wife left her digital camera in Canada and I don`t like mine,is somewhere in a drawer,too lazy to look for it.
By the way,the reason it`s called a gipsyes cooking stove is also because Romanians who are wealthier (than gipsyes) would rather build them out of terracotta tiles rather than just mud,however even tho is a cabin, I built it to be very modern looking on the inside and terracotta just would`ve looked too rustic for my 46 '' plasma TV , and leather furniture.So I opted for an inconspicuous wall like stove and is funny how my guests look for the heating source.
Moving to Romania was all together a great experience,mainly because I learned to build differently of what I was used to as a contractor in Texas or Canada.
The cabin is build of ecological mud bricks very cool in the summer and warm in the winter and although my masonry and brick laying skills came in handy this is a different school all together.
I`ve built my own fireplace in my home in Tx but other than the nice smell of wood and the visual effect it served no useful purpose.Also I`ve learned the receipe for the clay mortar and how to work with it.A fireplace takes about 10 days to make and it cannot be used untill it is completely cured,4-6 weeks later.
We`ve never lived as ecological in our lives,the cabin is in the middle of the forest,on 2 acres,no running water or gas or sewage, there`s virtually no waste since we burn everything and we feed our 2 German Shepperds the leftover food. I took on beekeaping as a hobby and the honey made of black locust flowers is just out of this world.
I am gonna hate it when I will move back to Calgary Canada but then again it was about business all along.

A life changing experience that I`ll always remember.