The Forest Tawi
Learning with Fire
Fire plays a central role in forest schools and bushcraft; it is our most useful tool.
Fire does the obvious like keeping us warm and cooking our food. Less well known is that fire can also give us crystal clear drinking water, eliminate bad smells, treat stomach complaints and make plants grow faster. These attributes were well known and widely used in antiquity. As we look for more sustainable solutions to our problems today, perhaps the time has come to rediscover and share what else fire can do.
Please note: when the Forest Tawi is alight, students must be supervised at all times by a responsible adult. Student safety is paramount. Always remember that all the surfaces of this stove get extremely hot.
The Forest Tawi package
The name of our unique stove comes from the Swahili word Tawi, which means small sticks or twigs. The original Tawi stove was invented in Kenya.
The Forest Tawi stove is designed to allow outdoor learning providers to explore and demonstrate the full potential of fire – from cooking to climate change. For those learning bushcraft skills, the Tawi’s ability to facilitate clean potable water is invaluable.
In the Forest Tawi outdoor stove, the heat generated from the burning wood is used by three distinct cooking surfaces. The fire itself burns so efficiently that there is virtually no smoke or sparks. After use the stove cools down within 20 minutes. Once cool it can be dismantled quickly and packed back into the water tank for storage and ease of transport.
Exploring Fire
with a Forest Tawi
There are many activities which can be undertaken with a Tawi Stove. Each of them has an associated activity sheet which contains useful facts and fun experiments, click here to see an example.
Amazing Biochar
Each of these topics has an associated activity sheet which contains useful facts and fun experiments, click here to see an example.
Support seven days a week
We are always on hand to help; we want your Forest Tawi to work well for you and your students. We can also arrange video calls to demonstrate the Forest Tawi.
Fundraise with your
Forest Tawi
While we think the Forest Tawi is good value for money, we appreciate it can be hard to find the funds to purchase one. With its three cooking surfaces the Forest Tawi is a consummate and versatile outdoor stove. It has the capacity to cater for a sizeable gathering of people. A barbecue is a great fund raiser; what better way to recoup the cost of your Forest Tawi!
Learning how to make a small fire in the ground safely is important and ancient knowledge which creates a particular and unique sense of security. We are not seeking to replace this, but rather to create different opportunities for exploring the power of fire.
The traditional campfire closely resembles how fire was first used by mankind. By simply removing the front of the chimney and the hotplate (this must be done by a supervisor) your Forest Tawi converts into an open fire trough. Compare and contrast these two methods of working with fire.
The Carbon Cycle is talked about a lot nowadays. Turning the wood you burn into solid charcoal prevents the release of some of its stored carbon as carbon dioxide. Every 1kg of porous charcoal you make is approximately 3kg of carbon dioxide that you have prevented from entering the atmosphere. This makes every Tawi design a carbon negative stove; you are actively removing carbon from the Carbon Cycle as you cook your food.
Efficient use of natural and renewable resources is what we strive for.
The smoke produced by ordinary fires is predominately unburnt volatiles – wasted energy. Every Tawi burns almost all the smoke it produces, making it an extremely efficient stove. We show you how to demonstrate this graphically to your students by switching the smoke burning part of the stove off and on. The Forest Tawi is designed to burn small sticks, twigs, ‘brash’, off-cuts, and pruning waste. As long as it is dry wood, it can be used as fuel. Burning wood that would otherwise be discarded means your fuel source is environmentally friendly and sustainable.
The Forest Tawi has three sizeable and distinct cooking surfaces; a top wood-gas burner, a hotplate and a grill. This makes it a very versatile stove.
You can cater easily for a group of students; for example: fry burgers or sausages on the top burner, and onions on the hotplate while toasting buns under the grill. Make a batch of ‘school’ chutney or jam; the top burner will bring a large preserving pan to the boil.
Conduct a simple experiment to demonstrate the amazing ability of porous charcoal to remove unwanted odours. Your Forest Tawi comes with twenty perforated drawstring pouches so your students can take away some of the porous charcoal they have made and use it at home; it works wonders in a fridge or compost bin.
Clean water in many parts of the world is difficult to come by. Yet, as you will be able to demonstrate through a simple experiment, porous charcoal can easily be used to purify very dirty water. It will even remove contaminants such as soap.
Biochar was first used by Native Amazonians some two thousand years ago to enhance the barren soil left behind after forest trees had been cleared. It enabled them to grow crops year after year, and sustained a huge civilisation for centuries. The porous charcoal you produce in the Forest Tawi makes excellent biochar for use in composting and garden soils.
If you still have charcoal left over, we show you how to make charcoal briquettes for use in a conventional barbecue. They burn cleanly and produce plenty of heat. Replacing purchased charcoal which often comes from unsustainable sources, with homemade briquettes is environmentally sound, especially as the Forest Tawi releases far fewer pollutants than a traditional charcoal maker.