Our New Wood Oven

A key thing for me when building our new extension was to make sure we had a means of cooking and heating off grid should we need it. 

We already have a stove in the sitting room that we use all winter. There's not many nights between November and March where it's not lit and we have plenty of firewood to keep us going. 

And although we can put a pan on top of the stove it's not ideal to cook with. 

Love the look of our new stove! 

I was a little obsessed with finding the right stove for our house and spent many houses researching what we should have and what would fit. To start with I thought it would just be another log burner like we had in the sitting room, maybe with a small oven on top. Luckily once I'd worked out what size we'd have available and spoke to some experts it turned out we could have a full on range in there!

Prepping On A Budget - Easy Cooking Off Grid

Okay so the last two posts in this series have talk about storing water for three days and enough food for an extra seven days. Now I want to talk about what you'd do to cook that food if your normal means weren't working.


Having a secondary cooking source is a really important area of preparedness. Being able to boil a kettle gives you a great way to make water safe to drink and also being able to heat food is great for making us feel better and making it good to consume.

Bringing firewood for next winter - for cooking and heating

I talked to a few friends after the winter storms we had this year. I was surprised how few had a secondary way of cooking, let alone heating themselves had the power gone out. Many are on gas but lots of modern gas cookers have an electric ignition/fan, etc so won't work without the power (worth testing if in doubt).