Make a Wood Stove Water Heater

Make your own DIY wood stove water heater. Our design, the Blazing Showers Stovepipe Water Heater, produces hot water that stays warm for up to 48 hours.

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by AdobeStock/nikkytok
Your wood stove can provide piping hot water for a relaxing shower.

Make your own DIY wood stove water heater. Our design, the Blazing Showers Stovepipe Water Heater, produces hot water that stays warm for up to 48 hours.

Three years ago, we were sitting in our cabins wondering how we could satisfy our addictions to hot baths and showers, without paying ridiculous prices for disappearing reserves of fossil fuels. Putting our talents together (one of us is a mechanical wizard and the other a Ph.D. chemist), we devised a homestead alternate energy system — based on the use of otherwise-wasted stovepipe heat — that has allowed us to take those hot baths. We call our system the Blazing Showers Stovepipe Hot Water Heater.

Wood Stove Water Heater Basics

As you can see in Fig. 1, an ordinary water heater is nothing more than a storage tank (located between a house’s water source and its various hot water faucets) sitting over a gas or electric burner. Since water tends to rise as it’s heated, cold water is piped in at the bottom of the tank, while hot water is drawn off from the top.

Fig. 2 compares such a conventional water heater with a Blazing Showers system. As you can see, our setup employs a coil of copper tubing — located inside a wood burning stove’s stovepipe — to heat the water that’s held in our storage tank. Hot smoke rising through the stovepipe warms the water in the copper coil, which causes it to rise (and thereby draw more cold water into the coil). Meanwhile, the stovepipe-heated water flows into the top of the storage tank, where it remains until someone decides to take a “blazing shower” and turns on a faucet.

  • Updated on Sep 11, 2022
  • Originally Published on Nov 1, 1976
Tagged with: living off the grid, off-grid, self-sufficient, water, water heating, wood heat
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