Cooking on a Wood Fire Stove | Dealing with Summer Heat

This video addresses a question we sometimes get asked: how do you manage with all the unwanted heat from a fire over summer? This is a fairly slow, relaxed and meandering video, featuring lots of outdoor summer living in our rural New Zealand countryside homestead, so all the information is here in the description if you just want to get straight to the point:
While plenty of people only ever really use their cast-iron range from early Autumn to late Spring (using alternative forms of cooking for the warmer times: gas/electric), many other customers, particularly those incorporating their Homewood in an off-grid homesteading type lifestyle, DO rely on their cookstove all year around for all their cooking, heating and domestic hot water production, so when the hot months arrive that heating aspect changes from a welcome feature into something that instead needs to be managed and worked around.
Ways to expel that unwanted heat in summer:
- having doors and/or windows on opposite walls in the install area, that can be thrown open while the cooker is going to create a through-breeze and whisk away the heat
- if installing heat transfer ducting (this kind of thing: www.mitre10.co.nz/shop/heat-t... - not a specific recommendation or anything; your local hardware store likely stocks various options) to send heat to the cooler rooms in winter, then consider adding a path to the outdoors, able to be opened up over summer to turn this system into an extractor
- where you have high ceilings, you will want a ceiling fan to push the rising heat down in winter to get it circulating around, so think about getting one that can also be reversed to pull heat up and out an appropriately-located window or vent in summer (this kind of fan: www.mitre10.co.nz/shop/goldai... - again, not a specific recommendation)
- where the kitchen range is going to be built into an alcove for a traditional style installation, hiding a vent that leads out-of-doors up in the topmost parts of the alcove, closed normally, but then can be opened up to let heat escape out over summer is both simple and effective
But the main way to avoid overheating is by falling in to a different rhythm over the warmer months. In winter, the stove might be running 24/7, or close to it, but with how easy and quick our stoves are all to light (www.homewoodstoves.co.nz/feed..., summer will see you instead lighting the stove up to run for shorter bursts, and less often - usually timed in the cool of the morning or evening, maybe only every other day or so, just long enough to cook a meal or two, some extra baking and loaves of bread for the following day and to boost your water temperatures back up. Then on the days the stove is not going, eating cool meals, or supplementing your cooking with outdoor living: barbecuing, grilling and pizza ovens.
Increasingly, we're seeing people who live off-grid opt to supplement their water heating setups with solar water panels (or solar electric, heating the stored water via an element; overflow for the solar electric system), which when combined with the hot water production of their Homewood's water jacket, creates a very harmonious and complementary system. On those cold, miserable days when the sun isn't heating up the solar, that's when the stove is most likely to be roaring along, doing the heavy lifting. Then on those scorching hot days where you'd really rather not be lighting a fire at all, the solar is at peak output picking up the slack. You can learn (A LOT!) more about all this kind of thing here: www.homewoodstoves.co.nz/reso...
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