Field notes · outside the usual routes
The stove I built to leak heat
Cuchumatanes, Guatemala · 2013
Every organisation building cookstoves in the Guatemalan highlands seemed to be chasing the same thing: efficiency. The less firewood a stove burned, the better the design was meant to be. I understood the logic — families spent too much time and money gathering wood, and the smoke from open fires was bad for their health, so a tighter, more efficient stove genuinely helped with both.
But in the cold villages of the Cuchumatanes I kept noticing what the efficiency argument left out. A stove there isn’t only for cooking. It’s where the whole family gathers each evening — eating, sharing atol, talking through the day until bedtime — and in a single-room house it’s the only warmth there is. I knew those hours first-hand, from years of living alongside families in Todos Santos and other Guatemalan villages.
So I built a stove that leaks some heat on purpose. The goal was never warmth instead of efficiency — the stove still had to move heat into the cooking surface better, and burn less wood, than the stoves it replaced. It was a balance: improve the cooking, but don’t design away the warmth those evenings depended on.
What efficiency alone missed
I’m not an engineer. What I had instead were years of eating in highland kitchens, sitting beside fires at night, and sleeping in single-room homes where the cooking fire was also the only heat in the house.
Cookstoves had become a serious subject in Guatemala around then. Carbon credits and clean-cooking money had brought real attention into the sector — I went to a conference in Antigua, funded as I remember it by the Gates Foundation — and organisations were setting up workshops in the touristy towns, Xela and Antigua. I visited some of them. The stoves were well made and genuinely efficient, and I admired them. But I kept seeing the same two gaps.
The first was the firewood intake, usually built small, for thin sticks. The families I knew didn’t cut their wood that way — they burned larger pieces, because splitting wood small with an axe costs time and energy nobody has spare. The second was warmth. A stove that captures every last bit of heat and sends the smoke cleanly up the flue makes sense on a test sheet. In a cold mountain house it can be the wrong kind of efficient: it cooks the food and leaves the room cold.
Designing for the room
So I designed around the life I’d actually seen. The stove needed an intake big enough for real pieces of firewood, not just sticks. It needed a cooking surface big enough for a family. It needed to give some heat back to the room, because in the colder villages that warmth was part of the day. And it needed a small shelf, because when people gathered around the fire at night with their atol, the cups and plates needed somewhere to go.
None of that came from engineering. It came from having been in the room. The mistake outsiders make is to treat the stove as a device. In those houses it was part of how the home worked.
The engineers were designing the heat out. I was designing it back in.
The problem that kept me awake
The hardest question wasn’t how to make a stove burn wood well. It was how to make a large, heavy cookstove portable.
Most projects solved that one of two ways, and I didn’t like either. You could make the stove small — easier to carry, sell and install, but not what I’d want if I were cooking in a highland house every day. Or you could build it in place from cement and blocks, which works but needs masons, materials and time, and turns a family’s home into a building site. I wanted something a family could actually buy, carry and assemble: large enough to be useful, heavy enough to hold heat, and still movable enough to reach a house with no road to it. For months that problem woke me up at night.
Brick, heat and weight
The answer I kept returning to was brick. Brick has good thermal mass — it soaks up heat while you cook and releases it slowly afterwards — exactly what a cold house needs. It’s also far lighter than a solid cement-and-block stove.
I already knew the man who owned a local brick kiln, so large paver-style bricks could be made cheaply. The idea was a metal frame with a free-standing internal brick structure inside it, thermally isolated with pómez, the volcanic stone Guatemalans build with. It wasn’t an obvious design — a free-standing internal combustion structure sounds like something that should collapse — and working out how to keep it stable took months and several prototypes. But if it held, the stove could travel in pieces: frame, bricks, pómez, cooking surface. Still heavy, but movable. In the mountains, movable was everything.
Don Fredy’s workshop
The first real versions took shape in Nebaj. Don Fredy had a welding workshop at his house, and for months he let me in almost every evening. I’d arrive with a new idea or a problem from the last prototype, and we’d stand there working out what to change — the frame, the intake, the combustion chamber, how the bricks sat inside, how the heat moved. I was taking an evening course in welding cars at the same time, which gave me just enough understanding to ask better questions about metal and heat.
We built several prototypes. One lived in my own house, where I could cook on it, dislike parts of it, change them and test again. I made smaller rocket stoves for corn and tortillas in that period too, but the big family stove was the one that took over my mind; I kept waking up with the next change I wanted to try.
None of the wider project would have happened without Greg Van Kirk, co-founder of Social Entrepreneur Corps and Soluciones Comunitarias — the local social business that could turn a good stove into actual jobs by distributing it. He backed it more than I can easily put into words.
When local engineers chose it
In 2013, engineers from ACODIHUE — a regional development association working with smallholder farmers across Huehuetenango — chose the model I’d been developing with the local fabricators, after testing a range of cookstoves. As far as I knew, I was the only person designing for that kind of adoption who wasn’t an engineer; what I had instead were the years in the kitchens.
What I respected most was who was choosing. ACODIHUE’s engineers come from San Francisco Las Flores, a village deep in the Cuchumatanes — local engineers deciding from inside the region, not outsiders guessing from a distance. And the families weren’t being given the stoves; they were putting their own savings into them. That raised the bar. The stove didn’t just have to be clever. A family had to want it enough to pay for it.
Leaky, but tested
“Leaks heat” makes it sound casual, so let me be precise. The stove was tested the way the sector tested everything: boiling measured amounts of water, weighing the firewood before and after, comparing fuel consumption run after run. Against the concrete stoves families in Guatemala typically built when they had the income for one, it came out — as I remember the results — substantially more efficient: measurably less wood for the same cooking. The warmth it gave the room was on top of that, not instead of it.
That arithmetic carried the economics too. Families paid for their stoves in monthly instalments they’d agreed to, and as I remember it, the firewood a family saved each month lined up with the payment. Owning the stove wasn’t a hardship; in effect, it paid for itself as it went.
The night in Chichim
Juan, a young man I’d trained — seventeen, wiry, a big grin under his baseball cap, and already married with a full-time job — and I were taken up into the mountains to install them, to high villages like Chichim, one of the highest I know of in Guatemala. We worked from first light to dark and slept in whichever house we’d reached by nightfall.
The stove drop · Chichim
That’s how I ended up in a single-room house, sharing a bed with Juan while the family slept a few metres away — two adults and two children in the other bed, the room serving as kitchen, living room and bedroom at once. It was bitterly cold. We had three heavy blankets over us, the kind that press on your chest until breathing takes effort, and even in all my clothes I couldn’t get warm. Twice in the night I went outside to urinate in the dark. The third time I got up it was around five in the morning and the stars were still out — but I wasn’t the only one under them. The village was already awake, the men gathering for the microbus down to town. Transport from a place like that might leave once a day, very early; miss it and you don’t simply catch the next one.
That morning explained the stove better than any drawing could have. The fire, the cold, the one daily bus, the single room — they were all the same problem, and the stove had to fit inside it.
Moving stoves by mule
In San Francisco Las Flores some houses had no road to them, so the villagers helped us carry the stove parts by mule. I remember the mule trotting ahead loaded with bricks, pómez and the metal skeleton of a stove — the moment all those months spent on portability paid for themselves. The stove was still heavy. But it moved, and because it moved it could reach homes a fixed cement stove never would.
I was told the snap peas grown on those slopes were destined for the UK. There was something quietly strange in the exchange: a British man arriving in the mountains with wood-burning stoves while the local peas travelled back across the Atlantic to Britain.
One morning we set off at five for a village spread across the side of a valley so steep and undeveloped it appeared to be nothing but mountains and waterfalls; ACODIHUE got us in by small off-road vehicle. The houses weren’t grouped along a lane the way they are in some places near the Mexican border around Las Huistas — they were scattered almost invisibly across the mountainside, some separated by deep gorges and tough thirty-minute treks. Even after years living and working in the region it was one of the most beautiful places I’d seen, and one of the poorest. The people met us with the same patience and broad smiles I found everywhere in Guatemala, even where we couldn’t share a word — the older generations spoke only Q’anjob’al, one of Huehuetenango’s nine indigenous languages, and we had no translator.
Installing the stoves · Cuchumatanes highlands
Installing the finished stoves in highland homes — the last-mile work the whole design was for.
After the prototypes
After about a year of designing, testing and selling the first stoves, manufacturing was set up in Nebaj by Soluciones Comunitarias. The programme grew through their network of women entrepreneurs, who were already carrying practical things into rural communities — eye exams, water-filtration buckets — across the western highlands.
That mattered to me, because the stove was never only the object. The point was whether something could be made, moved, installed and explained locally, by people who understood the communities it was going into. A stove that depends forever on the foreigner who designed it isn’t a good stove. It always had to leave my hands. And it did: the stove went on under the name La Estrella, and in 2014 MIT D-Lab field-tested it in Guatemala with the SolCom team — an independent record of a stove that no longer needed me.
What the stove taught me
I think of that stove whenever someone talks about optimisation as if it were the same thing as wisdom. The engineered stoves were better than mine by some measures — they burned more cleanly and efficiently, and would have looked better than mine on most test sheets. But mine was shaped by different questions. What firewood do people actually use? How cold is the house at night? Where do they put their cups? Can it reach a home without a road? Will a family want it in the room where they cook, eat and sleep?
Those questions changed the design. The stove leaked heat because warmth was useful. It took big firewood because that’s what people burned. It held heat because the room needed to stay warm after cooking. It came apart because the road didn’t always reach the door. Good design didn’t start with the cleverest solution; it started with paying enough attention to understand the real problem.
It worked because I’d been cold in the houses it was built for.
Why this one’s here
This wasn’t a house-building project, it wasn’t in Mexico, and it happened years before I built my own home in Chiapas. I still drive up into those highlands a few times a year, across the border at La Mesilla. But it’s where I learned the thing the rest of this site runs on. You can take a great deal from experts, plans and diagrams, and sometimes you need them. Yet if you haven’t sat in the room, watched the firewood being cut, followed the road until it ended and slept under the same blankets as the people you’re designing for, you’re still missing part of the truth. That’s what Alternative Lives is for — not to romanticise hard places, but to show what becomes visible when you stay long enough for the details to change your mind.
— Luke Burchell
Field notes
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