Airwood wood chip stove

Airwood is an inexpensive, high-quality, lightweight and powerful wood chip stove. I conducted a series of tests and found out that in terms of the speed of boiling water, it is not inferior to gas burners. This was my first acquaintance with such turbo stoves, and therefore along the way I had to understand the design, master ignition and refueling of the unit. The Airwood wood chipper made the most positive impression, so writing a review about it was pleasant and interesting. Read and be jealous :)

Airwood turbo stove design.

The size of the Airwood wood chipper is comparable to a 460-gram gas cylinder and will easily fit inside a 2-3 liter pot. The weight of the stove itself is only 290 grams, plus batteries (10 grams).

The turbo stove consists of 4 blocks:

• combustion chamber with mesh bottom
• housing
• kettle stand
• fan (turbocharging)
  

Despite the fact that Airwood stoves are produced in a semi-handicraft manner, I had no complaints about the quality of workmanship. The combustion chamber and body are made of high-quality 555 steel mugs. All cutouts are made carefully - the edges are smooth, without burrs. The riveted connections look secure. In general, the entire design gives the impression of good quality. It is clear that sooner or later the stainless steel will burn out and the stove will lose strength, but most likely by then it will have time to pay for itself.

How to assemble a wood chipper?

When I first saw the parts of the stove, I didn’t immediately figure out what to connect where (it’s not customary to read the instructions in our area). Several completely different options for connecting the ingenious components of this designer came to mind. To help others with assembling the stove and to make a cheat sheet for myself for the future, I’ll probably describe the assembly process in detail and step by step.

The Airwood stove comes in a simple fabric case. In the transport state, all the stove blocks are folded inside a rigid case according to the principle of a nesting doll - you can safely carry it in a backpack without fear of damaging it. So, we take the parts out of the case and lay them out in a thin layer.

Now we insert the combustion chamber into the housing. It is desirable that the connection be tight, without obvious gaps.

We place the stand under the boiler on top of the combustion chamber so that the long legs of the L-shaped supports are at the bottom. They plunge inside the chamber, and the semicircular wind deflector clings to the outer edge of the rim of the combustion chamber mug... Do you understand something? Watch the video below, maybe it will be better.

In short, the stand clings to the edge of the combustion chamber and sits there quite quietly.

The last step is to hang the fan on a screw screwed in above the round slot in the side of the case.

That's all, the assembly of the wood chipper is completed, you can move on to the next stage - testing.

Turbo stove testing

As in testing gas burners, I wanted to find out how much time and wood the turbo stove would need to bring 1 liter of water to a boil. To do this, I had to tear myself away from the computer and leave the house. An unnamed tree, vaguely similar to maple, with loose and loose wood, was chosen as a source of firewood. I deliberately abandoned good resinous firewood and took the most “garbage” wood that was literally lying under my feet. After walking under the tree, I collected several branches as thick as my finger. Then I broke them into pieces of 10 cm (the height of the combustion chamber), put them in a bag and weighed them. After each experiment, I re-weighed the package to determine the firewood consumption.

I was wondering if it was possible to boil water from one filling station without adding firewood during the boiling process, as happens with gas burners. Therefore, at the start of the first experiment, the turbo stove was filled to the maximum - 200 grams of twigs were tightly compacted into the combustion chamber. About the third minute of burning, the flame reached its maximum, the water in the pot even began to make noise, but it was clear that the fuse would not last long. And indeed, by the end of the sixth minute there was almost nothing left of the firewood, the heat subsided, the water calmed down. Then I began to slowly throw in twigs and the fire flared up again. However, due to the loss of time, the boiling process was prolonged and steam escaped from the pot only 18 minutes after the start of the experiment. The total firewood consumption was 300 grams (200 initially + 100 later).

It became clear that with such fuel, it was impossible to do without intensively throwing firewood. In addition, in the second and third minutes of burning, the flame was too large and would interfere with the fearless tossing of twigs. This is where the idea was born to significantly reduce the initial load.

In several subsequent experiments, I halved the initial amount of firewood in the chamber at the moment of ignition and more intensively tossed twigs during the combustion process. This way we managed to bring the boiling time to 5 minutes. In this case, only 200 grams of firewood were burned (of which 100 grams was the initial load).

It seems to me that by changing the level of initial filling and the tossing speed, after repeated experiments it would be possible to achieve even more impressive figures. But there was no time for this - the autumn sun was sinking towards the horizon and filming had to be stopped.

Igniting the wood chips

At first, to ignite the stove, I placed special kindling on the bottom of the combustion chamber (i.e., on a steel mesh) - strips of paper and small pine shavings. After that, he added a little more kindling to the mesh of the combustion chamber and lit it with a match through the hole for the fan. However, the kindling, pressed down from above by the main firewood, became compacted and prevented the free flow of air. Therefore, in the future I abandoned the intra-chamber kindling and greatly simplified the ignition scheme.

We don’t put anything into the combustion chamber except firewood. We stuff literally a couple of pieces of crumpled paper under the grate and bring a match. As soon as the paper begins to smolder, immediately hang the fan on. This method of ignition turned out to be the most effective.

Features of installing a turbo stove

During my experiments, the stove stood on a thick asbestos sheet (flat slate, about 8mm thick). When at the end I picked up this sheet, it turned out that despite such protection, the grass under the stove had dried out and become charred. It turns out that a significant part of the thermal energy is directed downward during operation. Therefore, in fire hazardous conditions (among dry grass or pine needles), a thin tin bottom may not be enough - it is better to install Airwood on a flat stone, or on bare soil.

In addition, it is desirable that the “foundation” be level. After all, the stove does not have a bottom, and if there is a gap between the bottom edge of the stove and the ground, then a significant part of the air forced by the fan will escape through it. This will reduce work efficiency.

That's all for today. I talked about the experience of practical use of wood chips on hikes in the next article.