Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Dietz Hurricane "barn" lanterns are the kerosene lanterns you might have seen on Little House on the Prairie or other shows from before electricity was common in rural area's. They have been made continually for More than 120 years...some folks use them "off grid" and others keep them as man cave item or for power outage or camping light.
   A few years back, Dietz came out with a clever model called the #2000, this model came with small cook pot and a modified lantern top....the idea was a cooker or food warmer if power is lost or perhaps wood is to wet to start a campfire. It is clever to use the waste heat of the lamp as cooking heat.
   However....I have watched a bunch of YouTube videos and the stock stove just fails to impress at cooking, some folks NEVER even achieved boiling water temps...one video the guy measured only 192 degrees water temp after close to 1 hour of heating!
   Also the cook pot is china aluminum ( likely not healthy to eat from) and the handle held on by single rivet leaks!

   Well, this looks like just the kind of thing I love to tinker with!...I think I can get it to perform better.

Here is what a stock unit looks like, this one is black but most common is green lantern.

To be continued.....



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The first step to DIY cooker is we Must remove the little "roof" at the top of lantern, the purpose of this roof is so the lamp will not go out in rain/snow and also to defuse the lamp heat so your hand will not get hot if you are carry the lamp around.
    With the roof removed the lamp will start to be a useable food warmer just by place a pot on the structure under the roof...but we need more improvements to get this think to cook.
   This is what it looks like with roof removed.


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First crude prototype is a heat shroud cut from a stove pipe part, it is the reducer that goes from 3" to 4" pipe. I drilled out some of the rivets and am using 2/3 of the original.
  This dropped boil time down to 9.5 min.

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I thought the cooker was to tall and wanted to get the cook top closer to fire, drilled out more rivets and now only use the center cone portion...can now boil water in 5 minutes....no rocket stove but getting respectable for a lantern!


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Wow, you really have that little lantern cranked-up!  Congrats on getting a cheap one that doesn't leak as they seem to have trouble crimping the fount correctly.

I've been using liquid fueled lanterns and stoves for a long time and have a small collection.  I've seen those cooker gadgets for lanterns, but they never really caught-on because the whole setup tends to be a little wobbly with a pan or pot on top.

The heat output will be completely determined by the wick size.  I think your lantern probably uses a 3/8" wick whereas a larger lantern like an Air Pilot or Blizzard will use a 7/8" wick and put out more heat.  The thing is, by the time you buy another larger lantern it would be cheaper to just purchase a wick stove.  The wick stoves available nowadays don't use a flat wick but a matrix of small round wicks almost like mop strings.  I have one of these stoves, but never have used it as I prefer using a liquid-fueled Coleman stove as it's less messy and easier to regulate.

Here is the little walmart lantern next to a Dietz Air Pilot. The air pilot is said to put out about 1400 BTU so there is more heat to work with.


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Yes, that lantern should get your rice warm!

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Here's an old pic of four of my wick lanterns burning, all in the Dietz family.  The flame heights are camera artifacts.

Well, the "Air Pilot" model does out perform all the lanterns pictured!
  It cooks rice in 26 minutes flat, I feel the combo of larger wick AND not as tall as a "Blizzard" lantern(on right) is key to performance.

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Here is the cooker at current design:
  The bbq sauce pan nests perfectly in the cooker, the seal was so good, it put the flame out, you may see 2 rows of holes on the cone, the first row restored the flame, but still some soot on bottom of pan, second row brightened flame and pan stays soot free.

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I like this design for soups and rice, thinking of building a similar unit but with the bottom 2" removed for fry pan, this will get my fry pan 2" closer to the fire, not really an issue with the soup pot as it is down inside the heat cone so plenty close, it will boil over with the small plate as a cover, so I want to find a 6" metal lid with handle and drill a 1/16" vent hole to vent steam.