howlmountainfarm: plantyhamchuk: Let’s briefly talk about ROCKET STOVES Ok, first let me say t
howlmountainfarm:plantyhamchuk:Let’s briefly talk about ROCKET STOVESOk, first let me say that they are not inherently bad. In fact, they can potentially be a very good thing, especially compared to a wood burning stove. They are a gassification stove, which burns the gases from the contents. They are highly efficient. They burn very hot. If your choice is between a wood burning stove and a rocket stove, the rocket stove is - theoretically - way better. And that’s why you’ll see so many DIY webpages and videos praising them, usually from permaculture hippies. There’s many different designs to choose from, some quite cozy.You’ll find said hippies using them in their not-particularly-flammable small cob/mud houses. Yes, they will keep you and your house warm and cook your food while using very little fuel, and if you are handy, you can make it yourself with a few skilled friends. Sounds amazing, right? You can heat your living space with just handfuls of bullshit sticks you find laying around instead of hungry wood stoves. However, where things can get tricky, is when you decide to try to put one in your wooden / stick built house or even a log cabin. For those who don’t know, back in the day… log cabins burned down all the freaking time. It was just a Thing, a risk of living in wood and heating the inside with fire. Most people don’t live in log cabins or rural areas so they’ve kind of forgotten this: fire is dangerous. Burning gases at very high temperatures, even more so.The picture above is from BEFORE the cob stove burnt part of the house down, she didn’t post pictures of the aftermath. This is a picture taken from a local acquaintance on Facebook, who had a custom rocket fire stove installed in her small wooden house. It worked great until it didn’t (and yes this is totally against code.. some codes are bullshit but others are to keep you from burning your house down).As always, the story here is FIRE SAFETY. You need ample non-flammable, non-conductive materials surrounding your stove. Under your stove. Around your stove. Above your stove. Sheetrock/gypsum, ceramic tile, and concrete are all options to consider. Go forth and create, but consider the potential consequences of fucking up, and try to plan for those as best you can. Rocket stoves have a few other issues as well. They’re expensive to build - I know someone who spent $200 on the triple walled stove pipe alone, which is enough to buy an EPA-approved wood stove used around here at least. If they’re not done exactly right, they don’t achieve gassification and function; poorly as a combustion heating device. They also require maintenance that many users are not willing to do. Finally, they require you to be around to feed them occasionally, although this is true for most wood-burning appliances with the exceptions of self-feeding pellet stoves and wood furnaces. Even with a large radiant heat mass, you can’t just burn a single small fire and heat all day, despite that being exactly what most people claim.We use a circulator style wood stove and it overheats our 575 square feet, but it’s also reliable, safe to leave while burning (with precautions), easy to use, and cost less than $100 used years ago. I’ve seen circulators for sale around here for less than $300, and these are models that can heat 1500 square feet or more with some fans to distribute the heat. Eventually we plan to move it out into a wood furnace enclosure so we can control the flow and heat and direct some of it to a greenhouse, at which point we’ll put some kind of Franklin style stove inside that’s more properly sized for direct heating. Pair that with an efficient heat pump and we’ll have the most efficient system we can achieve with self-installation and on a very limited annual budget. -- source link
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