Rocket Mass Heaters-Superefficient Woodstoves You Can Build (and snuggle up to)by Ianto Evans and Leslie JacksonRocket Mass Heaters-Superefficient Woodstoves You Can BuildMany people are not aware Ianto wrote a book on the Lorena stove many years ago, for a clay cooking stove used with low fuels. This booklet is the natural transition to home heating.100 pages, B&W and Color images and illustrations, softcover book. PUBLISHER'S REVIEW: This little book is about a revolutionary concept in wood burning stoves that ensures almost completely clean combustion with high efficiency use of the heat produced. Rocket Stoves are still experimental in that probably fewer than a hundred were in regular use by early 2004, but some have performed well, daily, for more than a decade. They save a lot of fuel, and completely rearrange our concepts of house heating, of wood burning, and of dependency on coal, oil, hydro or nuclear power for our comfort. Rocket Stoves can be built at home by relatively unskilled people. Rocket Stoves are the ultimate in efficiency, reducing wood to carbon dioxide and water vapor, with a little ash. Coupled with heat storage in a cob bench bed or floor they provide gentle heat for up to two days without an all night smoldering fire that poisons the neighbors and heats mainly the sky. They are quite safe for small children as there are no dangerously hot surfaces. Rocket stoves work by burning wood in a completely new way then providing almost all their heat for cooking, toasting, baking, or heating water or people. They keep you snug. Previously unskilled people can build them of local and recycled materials at almost no cost. Rocket Stoves incorporate the heat storage of a $10,000 mass stove, the convenience of a woodfired cookstove, the efficiency of a pellet furnace and limitless flexibility in design, all without moving parts, fans or motors. Here, for the first time, is published the story of the Rocket Stove, with theories and detailed descriptions and illustrations of how we and some of our friends have built successful models. Review of the Ianto's design by Ocean Liff-Anderson: From the "cob wood stove" discussion on flue-heated benches....... As far as I'm aware the ONLY way to do this right is to build a Ianto-style rocket stove...normal wood stoves require a tall, vertical chimney to draft properly. If you take a regular wood stove and try force the flue horizontal, the most likely occurance will be the fire will go out and smoke will fill your room...anto refined the rocket-cob design for over a decade, and the reason his rocket stove works with a long (up to twenty foot!) horizontal flue bench is specific to his rocket design. (If you don't know what a rocket stove is, it's a little elaborate to describe over email, so I strongly recommend buying his new rocket stove book!) So a well designed rocket stove combusts as close to 100% efficiency as anything I've seen. Why is this important, if wood fuel is plentiful? For one, no smoke to pollute our air. But note also that more efficient burning means more heat from less wood, hence less physical labor or money spent acquiring fuel, more time for other activities (gardening, reading, dancing, weaving, etc!) Regarding the appropriate-ness of building a rocket stove versus some other heat source for seldom-occupied buildings... we decided to provide two heat sources in the cob Kiva at Ahimsa Sanctuary ( http://www.peacemaking.org ). We have both a rocket (built by Kiko) for long term heating of weekend-long events, and a Rumsford hearth (built by Ianto) for providing immediate heat in the previously unheated building for evening-only events. The Rumsford fireplace burns hot and clean, and provides immediate, intense radiant heat (it melted a plastic bucket 5 feet away!) while the rocket heats a buried-flue bench as well as radiating heat through its drum. The key feature of Ianto's rocket is a super-insulated internal chimney, which he calls the "heat riser", which allows the wood to completely vaporize and burn at temperatures up to 1100F, so that only steam and carbon dioxide exit through the flue...no ash, no creosote, no chimney flue fires! Actually, it's instructive and somewhat amazing to smell(!) the exit gasses from a blazing rocket stove flue: no smoke, just steam more like a laundry-dryer vent with a nice woody scent! Cobbing Always, Ocean Liff-Anderson, Intaba's Restaurant, Corvallis, Oregon See the For more extensive information see the other Earth Building booklets on Pise...$16....the Earth Brick Construction book...$15. and Rammed Earth Walls..$14. on this web site. |