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After my first bushfire evacuation from the Murrumbidgee flats, I grabbed the usual documents, meds, water — and a single $40 cast-iron pot. The electricity went out twelve kilometres from the fire front, long before the flames reached the substation. My neighbour’s lpg stove still had pressure, but the auto-igniter was dead and she had no matches. My other neighbour’s portable butane cooker flared when a gust whipped under the verandah. The cast-iron pot functioned on a bed of coals scraped from a fallen ironbark, no pressurised fuel, no solenoid, no glass top to shatter from thermal shock.
A standard 4.5-litre Australian camp oven — bare iron, three legs, flat lid with a rim for holding coals — weighs around 8 kg. Preheat it slowly over kindling and it holds enough even heat to bake damper or slow-simmer a rabbit. In 2019, Bunnings and Mitre 10 regularly sold Chinese-made unbranded units for $38 to $45, and most country showground markets had secondhand Furphy-style pots for similar coin. That price has nudged closer to $50 in 2025, but the original $40 pot still sits in the back of the ute, seasoned with lard, no carrying case needed.
Cast iron does not care if the induction cooktop is dead. It can nestle directly into wood coals, sit on a gas ring, hang from a tripod over a pit, or balance on a brick rocket stove. The only failure mode is rust — a scrub with river sand and a wipe of oil fixes that. In a grid-down scenario, a pot that doubles as both kettle and oven means one less device to fuel, one less seal to perish, one less warranty card nobody ever honours.
Paperwork first, then the fun part. A fire permit from the local Rural Fire Service brigade costs nothing but time. I keep the Total Fire Ban app on the phone and check it before striking a match. The written rule is clear: on a day of declared Catastrophic fire danger, no solid-fuel appliance may be lit anywhere in the shire. That includes the Ozpig, the rocket stove, the fire pit, and the Weber. Council also requires a 3-metre clearance from any structure and an operating hose or 9-litre extinguisher within reach during use.
I keep a dry-chemical ABE 1 kg extinguisher hanging from the verandah post. The contradiction is not a contradiction. I do keep a propane stove. Off-grid in this context means no reticulated natural gas line and no dependence on 240-volt appliances for daily meals. Bottled propane is a stored fuel, not a grid connection. A Companion two-burner low-pressure stove runs on a 4 kg or 8.5 kg Swap'n'Go cylinder with a standard POL fitting.
It costs $79 from BCF and is the only cooking appliance I can legally light during a total fire ban, because gas burners with an Australian Standards AS 2658 certification are exempt so long as the area around them is cleared and someone is in attendance. A full 4 kg cylinder provides roughly eight hours of continuous twin-burner use and costs $26.50 to exchange at the servo in town. The fire pit is a cut-down 44-gallon drum sunk 300 mm into gravel, ringed with besser blocks I salvaged from the old chook shed.
I cook over it with a Furphy 9-quart cast-iron camp oven on a trivet, shovelling coals onto the lid to get the 180°C baking temperature for damper. A camp oven of that size weighs 9 kg empty and costs around $90 new at any rural stockist. The trivet is three star pickets driven into the clay at the pit's edge. Total outlay for the pit and oven was under $150, and the bulk of that was the camp oven. The Ozpig is a portable wood-fired cooker made from spun-steel gas-bottle blanks, with a hinged door and a 150 mm flue.
It sits on a fold-out stand so the firebox stays 400 mm off the ground. I paid $329 for the base unit at a field day in Mudgee. A single load of dry ironbark splits will boil a 2.4-litre billy in nine minutes and keep a hotplate above 200°C for forty minutes. The flue draws hard
ArticlesCalculatorsSite PlannerShopLiving off-grid demands cooking solutions that work without grid electricity or propane, yet my first attempt near Broken Hill proved how easily things go wrong. I spent $420 on a high-end portable gas stove, expecting it to handle the wind, only for the regulator to snap on a Tuesday, leaving me with a pile of uncooked beans and a $420 loss. That failure taught me that relying on a list of top-rated products with Amazon affiliate links is no substitute for knowing what actually holds up in the Australian outback.
Living off-grid means cooking without grid power or propane, and I learnt that the hard way. At a remote Australian site, my $45.90 budget gas stove cracked the burner head during a cold snap — no warning, no backup. Four methods see me through now: gas stoves, induction cooktops, solar ovens, and rocket mass heaters. Don't trust a single gas burner without a fallback. I did, and it went. The gear below carries Amazon affiliate links so you can weigh your options, but a product list won't mend a cracked burner head or replace the safety paperwork that keeps you compliant in the bush.
I run a two-burner Campmaster propane stove as a storm-proof backup, fed by a 9 kg gas bottle. The piezo ignition has delivered a clean light first go every time for three years of starts—not a single dud. During a westerly gale that ripped through the east paddock and flattened the bean trellis, the flame held steady while I boiled a billy without shielding the pot. When a summer storm drowns the kindling and kills the wood fire, that stove puts a pot of tea on the table inside four minutes.
It cost $79 at the local hardware in 2021, and it stays tucked in the cyclone shelter unless the main off-grid method quits—which is how a homestead that runs on sunlight and fallen timber squares a single propane appliance with the rule of no grid connection.
I've run a 10,000 BTU single-burner camp stove with piezo ignition for years. It weighs next to nothing, packs flat, and lights without a match even when my hands are cold or wet. I carry it on the track and keep it at home as a backup when the kitchen stove packs it in.
Coleman Classic Camping Stove on Amazon
My induction cooktop draws from the solar-battery bank, and the magnetic field does its work straight in the pot — nothing wasted heating the air around it. That arrangement pushes efficiency to 80% above gas, which matters when the sun's your only fuel pump. It does need a stable current though; if the battery voltage dips, the unit complains or cuts out. Hold the power steady and you've got the best temperature control of any cooking method I've used out here.
The single-hob induction plate that lives on my kitchen bench cost $49 from a hardware chain in Bathurst. It draws a measured 1780 watts on full, which my 2.4-kilowatt inverter handles without tripping the low-voltage cutoff, provided the batteries sit above 50 percent charge. Benchtop real estate is tight. The unit’s 280-millimetre-square footprint fits where a two-slice toaster used to sit; that toaster burned a quarter-kilowatt-hour for two rounds of bread and I turfed it a month after I went fully off-grid. The induction plate has no open flame, no vapour line, and no mantles to clean.
I keep a nine-kilogram propane bottle and a two-burner camp stove in the shed for the weeks when cloud cover drops the solar harvest below four kilowatt-hours a day, but the induction hob does ninety percent of the cooking on this place. The auto shut-off has done its job once already—a patient call pulled me away mid-cook and the element cut itself before I made it back inside. That circuit triggers at one hour of no button input.
The control board reads a thermistor under the ceramic glass; if the pan-bottom exceeds 270 degrees Celsius, the unit hard-cuts power until it cools. I learned that the first time I tried to sear a yearling rump on the boost setting with a heavy cast-iron skillet—the hob tripped, the steak stalled, and I had to finish it in the Cobb cooker outside. Now I preheat on a 600-watt step, then lock it at 1200 watts for meat. My pans are not induction-rated.
An older 26-centimetre solid-cast skillet, twice re-seasoned with rice bran oil, seats flat enough for the hob’s coil to detect it. The steel frypan is a pressed carbon-steel unit
GoWISE USA Induction Cooktop on Amazon
The solar oven sits out in full sun and turns light into heat. No fuel to cart, no flame to tend, no noise to put up with. I leave a pot of stew inside and spend the afternoon in the garden, coming back hours later to a hot meal and a dial I never touched.
Uses sunlight to reach 400'F without fuel. Includes a thermal bag for extended cooking and works in cloudy conditions. Great for baking and boiling.
My rig is a wood-burner fitted with a heat riser and a fair slab of thermal mass. It pushes out steady heat for the cooktop and keeps the cabin warm, burning wood about 90% cleaner than the old pot-bellies I used to wrestle into the corner.
That book stays on the shelf within arm's reach of the stove. It isn't gear, but I treat it like it is – the reference I trust when I'm sizing up a new build. Step-by-step plans, diagrams, full material lists. Everything I need to work out whether I've got the timber, the fittings, and the weekend to pull it off.
The cob bench in our outdoor kitchen stays warm enough to dry tea towels for six hours after the fire goes out. The guts of it are a steel 200-litre drum set on its side, clad in a mix of local clay, sand and chopped straw. Flue pipe runs horizontally under the earthen seat and exits through a 150 mm stainless chimney.
The core is a simple J-tube rocket: a short feed tube, a burn tunnel lined with 115 mm x 230 mm solid clay pavers salvaged from a demolition yard, and an internal riser made from a length of 150 mm flue pipe wrapped in a 50 mm blanket of perlite-clay slip. Total materials cost sat at $147 in 2022, including a second-hand drum from a farm clearing
A two-burner LPG camp stove and a box solar oven live side by side on my verandah. The gas stove gets a 9 kg bottle swapped at the servo for $32; that bottle runs a month of morning tea, porridge, and one-pot stews. Gas is your go-to for portability—I’ve lugged the same stove to paddock lambing camps and the bush nursing outpost. A Sunflair solar oven folds into a black nylon carry bag, costs around $400, and will roast a 2 kg chook in four hours on a clear November day without a lick of fuel.
Solar ovens need zero fuel, but they won’t cook your tea after dark. Inside the house, I used a single induction hob for twelve months while the batteries were new. It pulls 1800 watts flat out. Induction only makes sense if the solar’s already running to feed it, so it got switched off by 3 p.m. through the winter solstice fortnight. I sold it on the community noticeboard. Rocket mass heaters are serious kit—built into permanent off-grid homes where you want steady heat through winter
Every bit of gear in my kit gets tested before it sees a real cook-up. A stove I haven't run through its paces doesn't get used when dinner's on the line. Anything that burns well stays clear of other heat sources, and I'll crack a window or fit a flue every time—ventilation in an enclosed space isn't negotiable.
Worth a watch: 17 Essential Off-Grid Cooking Techniques! · PrepaSure
Yep, so long as it carries the AS 2658 Australian Standards certification. The area around it has to be cleared and someone needs to be in attendance the whole time it's lit. My Companion two-burner from BCF is exactly what I fall back on when the RFS slaps a ban on the shire.
Council here wants a 3-metre clearance from any structure and either a running hose or a 9-litre extinguisher within reach while the fire's going. I hang a dry-chemical ABE 1 kg extinguisher off the verandah post - close enough to grab in a hurry, out of the way enough not to trip over in the dark.
In my book it does. Off-grid just means no reticulated natural gas line and no leaning on 240-volt appliances for the everyday cook-up. A Swap'n'Go bottle is stored fuel, same as the diesel in the generator - not a grid connection.
Wander down to your local Rural Fire Service brigade and have a yarn with the captain. It costs nothing but a bit of your time, and you need one before you light any solid-fuel appliance outdoors. I also check the Total Fire Ban app on my phone the morning of any cook-up - on a Catastrophic day, nothing gets lit, not the rocket stove, not the fire pit, not the Weber.
While many off-grid projects are achievable as DIY, certain situations require licensed professionals:
Always check local regulations and obtain necessary permits before commencing work.