Ironing Clothes with Charcoal

Charcoal has pluses and minuses -- fully 2/3 of it's energy is lost burning wood to make charcoal fuel and it's more expensive to buy than wood. On the other hand it's lighter to carry and is more compact than wood. Indoor air pollution from chimney-less wood burning is directly attributable to very high 3rd World infant mortality, cancer and emphysema rates. Charcoal DOES have low particulate and smoke emmissivity in comparison to wood, even taking less cleanup work and sooting pots less. However charcoal can have (almost always does) dangerously high carbon monoxide (CO) levels, often lethal indoors. This is because of the absense of live flame above typical charcoal fires, unlike wood fires. Cooking atop a short chimney (pipe or tube section) placed atop a charcoal fire creates much more draft and allows flame combustion of CO or smoke. Directly measured decreases of charcoal CO with better drafting are in the order of 8,000-9,000%! If you have the bandwidth to view this a fine video illustrates this problem and solution using an African Jiko stove:


Charcoal Burning Rocket Stove

CO and smoke can be largely combusted in open wood or stove fires when properly drafted and not over-choked with fuel. Obviously, usually this is not the case.
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Some pre-electric irons are hollowed for coals heating like your photo shows (nice example) while others are just solid iron and are placed atop a metal stove top or griddle to heat. I've seen more of the solid type myself.

Love this blog post (more Stove shots please) - I was just cooking over a wood fired Rocket Stove of my own making while packing my wonderful old smokeless WoodGas Cookstove (I'm getting a new one!) to give to a friend that could use it. Good stuff.