Your videos are appreciated, Robert. You are giving people multiple options to partially or even completely meet their energy needs in key areas. What they do with those options are completely up to them. What the idea seems to be, if I understand what Robert is attempting, is for people to improve and refine the devices and freely share their findings/efforts so beneficial devices that work can be replicated and put to use by others. In this way, research and development can be shared by many and should result in useful, beneficial devices built from easily sourced parts that are affordable and require minimal skills for end users to assemble. Bickering and excuses suggesting things can't be done are a part of human nature and understandable, but are usually not helpful toward achieving the end goal. Well thought out contributions/suggestions and hands-on work are what is needed to move toward the end goal, IMHO. Toward that end, if ongoing funding based on results (partial funds released upon each step forward) could be set up for people doing the hands-on work to cover materials, the process would probably move forward a lot quicker. Perhaps something like crowd-funded grants to people who actually put in the time and effort to build these devices. The whole concept seems to be to reduce reliance on our current systems and corporations and literally put the power in the hands of We The People. At any rate, that's how I see it.
Great video. Thank you! With one of these, you could have an off-grid home and heat each room as needed with one of these as long as you have a proper flue hooked up to it. That's amazing.
I love that you shared the @mylittlehomestead rocket mass heater. I hope you enjoyed their channel as much as I have. To anyone watching it please be careful. Have food provisions, tell your loved ones you will be unavailable for a few days, and get someone to watch your dog. Pretty much the same routine for when someone first finds this channel.
Your videos are so amazing to watch! Especially the ones about heaters, coolers, and windmills! I've been hunting all of those down in your channel to try and watch them! I really loved the Darwin's Windmill and I have a little tidbit to add to it! It's design is extremely close to ancient Persian "air conditioner"! They were basically tall square or octagonal towers that drew in air from the top, pulled it down to a aquifer or a cool tunnel underneath the house which cooled the air before the air went into the house and cooled the inside!
Yes, a manifold would work really well with this design. I also think a secondary mass(ie...sand ect.) for the exhaust to heat with a ceramic or terracotta side facing in toward the room to heat would be a nice add on. Nice build Rob! Baffle it too much though and it will start to get really noisy as in loud popping noises as it sucks air in. With this build probably not so much though. Great and interesting video Rob!
I think I need to specify what I was talking about. If the top of your box enclosure gets too hot this could become thermo-acoustic like the hot and cold side of a thermo-acoustic engine and making a noise as it vibrates. Chances are that your build there will not as it still is able to force air through the box well enough to overcome the pressure needed to clear the box. Cheers!
Thank you again Rob. Just a fair warning: If you collect too much heat and the gas temperature drops below 50C, the water in exhaust gases starts to condensate inside the chimney and can cause serious troubles. Especially if you have brick chimney.
@@ThinkingandTinkering It depends on the fuel. Burning 1000g wood creates about 500 - 700g of water which you don´t want to end up inside your chimney 😉
From your experience Robert, does a double or triple baffle really increase the heat output a lot more ??? Would you let us know as winter is coming soon. Had one more thought Sir, how would you make a wick for a kerosine heater using carbon fiber wick material that can keep the fiberglass reinforcement for emergency shutoff of the KERO heater ??? Thank you for your time Sir too.
Scandinavian stoves have an incredible over and back flu system which extract all the heat you could incorporate this rather than the baffle plate and Retain the Rocket stove viciousness and still be able to vent it through an internal chimney Love all the work You Do Robert
Robert, thought it might be worth considering doing a version for people with no fireplaces by simply having the rocket stove outside and use an enclosed box or similar to what you used here but simply as a heat exchanger and use a small fan and some semi rigid expandable aluminium duct to push or pull the air inside the home via a wall vent or adapter through a window
I have a pretty extreme idea but I need to get some two inche tube to try it. Rob you are pretty amazing and if you add a blower on the air intake it would surly help get the burn going harder
@@karlmyers6518 that mild steel wouldn’t take that kind of heat. It’s doubtful that it will last very long even being naturally aspirated as he has it.
Next, step in heating efficiency.👇 Using indoor air to fire it and venting the exhaust, pulls COLD air from outside through cracks in walls around doors, windows and whatnot into the home adding to cold drafts. The next step in efficency is to make a fresh air intake using outside air. And one can preheat the fresh air intake by running it through a portion of the exhaust. That way you loose less heat and your house is less drafty with less cold outside air being drawn around windows doors and cracks.
I have been thinking about this for a while but ended up thinking the exhaust gases are way too hot. My brick chimney is rated for 350C. It would be interesting if you could measure the temperature of the gases going up the chimney. Keep up the great work
Hello Robert, I just want to say awesome work that you are doing. Thank you for the dedication that you have been giving. I would like to ask, what are the chances that you can get a venturi from there. That in turn can be used to generate enough power. In a sense say that the system replaces a solar power panel?
I had seen the last example Stove you showed in the video before. It's a little more complex in the fire box design as it creates a3 stage burn by allowing the pellets to begin burning on one level and as they get smaller, they fall through a grate to the second level, then again into the ash box. This is supposed to allow for continuous burning for days or months on end. Perhaps a similar feature added to your stove would be a nice feature. You might also consider a second feed box on the side for pellet feeder. This would give you multiple fuel capability.
Cracking fun what you are doing with rocket stoves and all the other heating projects! check out the rocket stove setup in Earthship homes, cobb structures etc. with the correct set up the exhaust gasses cool quickly in the outer chamber where the burn pipe IS insulated from the outer chamber and the outer chamber radiates enough heat to cool the gasses just enough, causing the exhaust to push itself through long horizontal pipes embedded in earth benches and requiring little to no traditional draft of a vertical chimney These designs have a little more detail and are great for permanent installations using the mass of the bench as a heat battery!
You can also put you're flue exit into a much larger box and create a stratification chamber to extract even more heat but expel the coolest gases up the chimney.
I’ve got raked ceilings, with no chimney/flue, and have been toying with the idea of getting a length of 3” stainless exhaust tube, attached to the rocket stove, bent 180’ at the top, returning to the middle of my window height with a steel panel insert to fit the window frame, and an outside flue to above the roof. All sections bolt together in about 5 minutes with standard exhaust fittings. On the inside tubing, weld on lengths of flatbar fins for increased surface area.
Flue is to control draft/air flow through your fire and exhaust gases. It would do you zero good above the roofline it need to be at the top of the combustion chamber, bottom of the flue pipe/chimney pipe.
In a sealed room, the occupants could be in competition against the stove to get oxygen. In a ventilated room, the cold air from outside will travel across the area, in my house, I choosed to canalise the air from outside directly into the burn chamber, the intake is thermaly insulated to avoid condensation.
it's a way to go - but a little anal - all houses have ventilation - they. have to or just breathing would kill you - by ventilation we are not talking about throwing open all the doors and windows while a hurricane is blowing - ventilation is really pretty gentle stuff - having said that we each go for what we go for and it ends up being a little six or two threes
@@ThinkingandTinkering My 'house' [its doing it way too much charity to call it that] is so drafty it feels like the Vietnam era here. Bugs crawl through holes in the walls and into the interior of the place all the time. I literally heat with an open radiant gas heater inside with no worries about suffocation or carbon monoxide poisoning. There's almost zero retention of heat in this place, as was the case in the house I grew up in, so suffocation is no more of a threat to me, than drowning. [I live at the top of a cliff up a steep slope, near the highest peak in 600 miles, so water can not pool here]
Your right it really does help. I added them to a secondary burner on a wood stove it increased output at full burn from warm to the hairs curling on my arm. Added 2 inch fins 1-1/2 inch apart.
@@tomtaylor135 could probably also have fins on the inside also, when you increase the heat transfer is there a point where the stove puts our too little heat thru the chimney so the air thru it is not good?
Small piece of advice might come in handy. Taking advantage of residual heat can really come in handy especially facing these rolling blackouts. I do it all the time anyways I run off space heaters majority of the time and I use my oven as a thermal batter By simply opening the oven door and putting Myspace heater facing inward not only does it warm the air in my place but it warms the stove and the stove radiant heats to the rest of the kitchen
And it may seem dumb now... But the ancients built with rock and Historically people used stones to hold heat might be worth doing when push comes to shove
@@cavelvlan25 My dad built a 24 ton fireplace at our old house, just so it would have a lot of thermal mass. Since our house had next to no insulation [he was terrified of fiberglass, but somewhat rightfully so, and modern plastic insulation had not been made yet] he depended entirely on gargantuan thermal mass, and the working hands of 4 out of 5 young children to keep pumping firewood into it day and night. It also had internal chambers to exchange that heat so that with just a small fan, this massive mountain of masonry kept a 2700 SF house decently warm in northern Arkansas, even in -5 F weather with a sheet metal roof and almost nothing for insulation.
@@hunnybunnysheavymetalmusic6542 sounds like a heck of a stove haha. Fiberglass is not fun or friendly. It is unfortunate almost all modern insulation is sky high right now I would love to insulate my place better.
@@cavelvlan25 2 super cheap kinds of insulation you can get or make: 1: plastic shopping bags [flammable, but insanely cheap, and insanely efficient], 2: aircrete. Insanely efficient, not the easiest or neatest of options, and not nearly as cheap leftover shopping bags. PERSONALLY i would pick aircrete for the following reasons: 1: Fireproof, 2: can have flame retardant(s) added into it, 3: will not rot, 4: finds gaps that even plastic can not find, 5: has some structural value, 6: can have refractory components added to it, 7: can have waterproofing ingredients added to it, and 8: helps make a home slightly more earthquake and tornado resistant because it bonds to all of the properly prepped surfaces and makes the entire structure 'unitized' as a form of crude 'composite'. The only things you need to do to ensure a good pour of aircrete before you pour is to 1, 'adhesion wash' all the areas you wish to bond it to. This can be done most easily with a low pressure spray wand with a swiveling head, inserted from the top or the bottom of any vertical wall, and from any end/side of a horizontal plane such as a floor. This adhesion material is also home made, and contains a mixture of the water soluble 'water glass' with some ultra fine cement powder in a light but self suspending slurry, and 2, follow this by plugging any holes where the aircrete can leak out of when you do to pour it. You may want to let the holes alone a few days before you put in the aircrete though, just to be sure that the preparative coating has time to harden up. This material will partially soak into any porous surface it sticks to [which means it won't stick to very well to romex or PVC, but that might end up being a good thing, as you never know when you may need to service those] and act like a primer, to ensure that the aircrete then has an ideal surface to bond firmly to. Once it hardens, it will greatly increase the total strength and rigidity of the structure. THIS guy, is like THE KING of aircrete!!! I have NEVER EVER seen ANYBODY do as much with aircrete on the face of the earth!
rocket stoves are the inital burning chamber for most mass heaters. You run the exhaust line through a large run through sand or something simmilar built into a bench or wall so as you burn during the day it holds the heat and dissapates it through the night. This is simmilar to how Siberian homes work with their small fireplaces in subzero temps
I have wondered if using a cast iron pan on top of the rocket stove would have a similar effect as a cast iron wood stove does of absorbing and releasing heat from the fire inside into the room. I guess you just went a more expensive route or is it more efficient?
I've built a pellet basket for mine, worst issue is overheating and flash burning the pellets...any ideas for a efficient heat sink? Should the fins be 90°, 45° down, or 45° up? Should I just perforate the feed tube? I'm getting so close to heating a home on $5 a day or less, and I can't seem to find any answers!
Insulation isn’t necessary i’ve been burning a2 inch round rocket stove with pellets and it’s only steel it will reach About eight or 900° at its maximum and I’ve never had to replace anything on it I believe that’s because it’s allowed to cool down quicker with no insulationAnd with no insulation it still gets hot enough to burn 100% clean
I knew a boater who would circulate glycol through his back boiler using convection and then into a radiator. Normally it would be pumped to other radiators and under floor heating, but the convection radiator had to be there in case the pump failed, proving it can be done passively.
The timing of this video is great for me since I'm getting ready to build a Rocket Mass Heater for my itty-bitty mobile home. RSM gave me a thought (again): Would a car radiator in-line with the exhaust be piratical? I've three small aluminum ones I think I could place at the farther ends of the exhaust (or maybe a 20' side run to the bedroom). Optionally, I have access to the old steel radiators for higher heat tolerance. Or perhaps a closed-loop water filled piping system may be more practical?
If you had lagged your inner tube to insulate it a little you would have got more draw and a cleaner burn , Don't take it as a criticism just adding to the pool of information, The hard core rocketers will run meters of pipe horizontally through a large thermal mass and need the extra pressure to achieve this, I really enjoy your vids Rob, you cover a very diverse range of topics, Cheers Brent
love your show - thank you - here's an idea - design a micro induction stove heating an insulated pot where you could stack 4-5" stainless bowls and cook a 3 course meal using a a cell phone charging battery or a car battery.
I was wondering if someone was going to mention that! I actually just picked one up this summer and it’s rocketing away on pellets in the basement. Happy so far, little tricky to get used to depending on your draft.
are you getting paid by him to mention him all the time? Larry Winiarski, Technical Director of Aprovecho, began developing the rocket stove in 1980 based on a VITA stove, designed by Sam Baldwin, and rediscovered the principles of the systems developed by the Romans in hypocaust heating and cooking systems. A stove was designed to make tortillas based on the principles of the rocket stove and won an Ashden Award in 2005. Aprovecho won the same award in 2006 for their rocket stoves. Aprovecho rocket stoves were sold in Lesotho, Malawi, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.
I know you showed the rocket mass heater briefly, would have been nice if you had shown examples of fire brick & mortar foundation with a steel barrel or can, with exhaust going out the bottom and up the chimney.
Your burn tube may only last a few months, our burn tube reached 1200C easily, and we had it made of furnace materials. We built it too big for the house and had to give it away as the house approached 38C It is a fantastic way of getting rid of your waste when you get temps above 1200C there is no smoke and the chimney stays clean, topping that the amount of as in the final chamber is minimal, about 1/2 Kilo for 7 months use (2 seasons)
I used a 1/2" plate as a cooktop on my build. It got cherry red and warped something awful. My secondary air supply, an L-shaped metal tube to pre-heat the air and the upright tube to put the air up into the burn melted out in 2 weeks of steady use.
Mike, thanks for using the correct terminology (burn tube vs rocket stove). This video provider has yet to recognize what makes a rocket stove and the fact that a properly constructed one burns at twice the temperature (as you disclose) that his burn tubes produce. Also, the fuel consumption for a rocket stove is about half of what he describes as his experience. I have twice commented to him that he should read Ianto Evans’ book (inventor of the rocket stove) to better understand the technology.
@@terryharris3393 His model qualifies as a rocket stove. His temperatures would benefit from an insulated burn chamber, of course...but then the steel vaporizes faster. But it's a rocket, for sure...at least in my 15+ years of rocket development.
Isolation of the primary chimney may help to burn the gasses better, but for a roomheater thar can make sense only if the exhaust doesn't lead directly to the chimney but will first be lead to a radiator or some kind of 'mass' that will keep yr room warm
I'm wondering if you use thin fire bricks (like in a regular heater) to glue to the outside of the box and hopefully absorb as much heat from the gas exhaust before being extracted out the flue. Would that rating maximum heat to radiate to the room?
Hi Robert I watched your video on Rocket stove house heater, I sent you a message about the same thing some weeks ago. But people get so frightened when there is something Like that in there home and so they should, the best way to do it is what The (Ramdom Farmer) does IT'S ALL OUTDOORS with very little danger, you can get bluetooth camera cheap to keep a eye 👁 on it The heat blowing into the property is best He is all so using Waste oil, it's a brilliant idea you should try one for your self use old washing machines for the Box save on cost if you put a post out saying you need some. you can also use the metal for other projects I think you will Love it and it will make you have a good laugh 😀 it's chuckles me up when you do . By the way am 60 now
I agree with your ideas mate - but this is done for folks who have never done anything like this - so I am trying to keep it simple - but I like your idea
The Vortex Stove explored in Video # 1730 is perfect for supporting flame in a confined space and greatly reducing impingement. And the 3 curved plates circling the flame is the very best example to archive this that I have seen. And combined with the second jacket as illustrated in Video 1741 provides a location for a copper water coil to be in the flue stream without being introduced to direct flame. This would work well just like the outdoor furnace so common in Canada. The water would be circulated into the home and through a water coil in existing ductwork for example. Now what I haven't seen yet is the introduction of a proper WASTE OIL burner at the base complete with an auto float system that maintains a constant level in the pot and does not use the more common fuel drip system which is subject to temperature, supply tank level, and potential clogging. Your thoughts?
So Robert a question about rocket stoves , is can it be made to work in a similar way to the vevor diesel heater that you featured in one of your video's in a similar way to what you've done on this video by fitting old motorbike cylinder's onto the manifold, then boxing them in & then fitting a fan to the box to blow air across the hot cylinder's to then vent out into the room for heating??? (Ps: also can the wasted heat from the exhaust on these diesal air heaters be captured using a similar principal to what I'm talking about here? ( Just seems such a waste of good heat from the exhaust to the outside!) Loving your videos by the way! Many thanks for the good entertaining way in which you do them! From Johnny bird up in chilly North Yorkshire!🥶🥶🍻😂🤣
One design I made was similar too Robs classical initial build but I welded 6 X 100 mm tube to the 100 mm upright . One on each side . Only spot weld every 100 mm along . This creates conductive passive air flow for the room . The burn chamber went up 1.5 m and back down and out . It created a lot of heat and it was open plan living . Certainly wasn't a set and forget relaxing fire though . The burn rate was every ten minute with dry hardwood but man did that thing get hot . I ended up putting it out in the shed as it was not a practical design for in the house . A bigger fire area for larger pieces would be better for that like a arm size peice .
The horizontal part of the stove needs to be longer, because the smoke will stay in the flame longer, giving more smoke the chance to burn, causing more heat, and the riser needs to be round with the incoming fire, heat, and any smoke to enter off center which causes a swirl, so instead of everything just rising up, any remaining smoke has more time to burn, allowing for more heat.
Thanks to your channel I am thinking of a big rocket stove enveloped with a 2 ton'ish sand battery with a water heat exchanger plumbed into my underfloor heating. In Scotland we are using £3-£5 per day on heating only, our worst was £7.30 in 24 hours. If it wasn't for my O.A.P parents and Mum being disabled I would turn the bloody heating off. And we are not even in the depths or winter yet. All very, very frightening.
All very interesting, but I as many would have to undertake some major renovation work to open up my fireplace and chimney. Many homes simply won't have these built in to their homes. Like someone else commented. It would be useful to see what you could come up with for an external stove. Although less convenient to keep fuelled up, would be easier to install. How could we transfer heat to our existing heating system, such as a boiler and radiators. Is it possible?
Hi Robert. I love your work and videos. You inspired me to build my own rocket stove. I can see that some of them have wood inlet welded on the side of the chimney and other on the top of the horizontal air tunel. Could you please explain the advantages of both solutions? Is there any particular reason to choose one of the solutions? Cheers!
there is no real reason though I am guessing there are lots of arguments why one is better than another - I just dis agree with that - if I were you and this was my first time would just go for one you candid easily and run sufficiently
@@ThinkingandTinkering Thank you. I will weld the wood feed on the air tunel - it'll give me more space for an additional "shell" on the chimney. Have a nice day!
I've seen the same type of set up made into a thermal mass heater using a 40 gallon drum and stones or bricks around the flue, but not sure how easy they would be to clean.👍
If the Rocket stove is built correctly, then it burns so clean, that there is virtually nothing left behind. That said, a lot of "rocket mass heaters" have built cleaning ports into their designs.. "Just in Case". The ones Im talking about, tend to use a long bench that the exhaust pipe runs through... which stores the heat into the benches mass. People put some thick padding on top of it, and can sit or lay down on it.
Another way is to use heat exchangers on each end. Pipe the heat into the house with copper or aluminum tubing. Fire outside, radiator inside. Oil or water might work.
Hi Robert.. would love to see you guys make a wind up clockwork auger for automatic feeding of pellets...wouldn't know where to start with a windup project but its an engineering skill that needs to be re-introduced.
@@richardkern5185 damn... That's half of it. But the clockwork bit is of interest to me. Windup clockwork that takes out the electric or so called gravity fed.
It doesn't have to be anything super complex. Put a mass on a chain and hang it from a gear. Put a ratchet on the gear so the mass drags the gear along, but you can pull the other end of the chain to raise the mass without reversing the gear. Then connect the gear to another one driving the auger with an appropriate gear ratio and you're all set. A bit of experimenting to get the weight and gear ratios just right, but shouldn't be too hard. I imagine you can get most of the parts you need from a bicycle, you'll just need much longer chains.
I really enjoy your videos, even if some of them, such as this rocket stove and its indoor adaptor, are way beyond my skillsets. I am hoping to have a go at your Homemade Heater, the one in 1702, but I've hit a snag. It's this 100% carbon felt you use for the wick, I just can't find this stuff anywhere. I did find a 98% carbon felt, but you emphasise in the video, to make sure its 100%. I even sent your shop a message, asking if any of the material you sell was what I'm looking for; none of your listings that I can see mentions anything about 100% carbon felt. Unfortunately, I received no answer to my query, maybe you overlooked it, so I'm asking here the same question, is there any material on your website that is 100% carbon felt, by another name. I do hope you'll help me with this, Jack Frost has already been peering through the windows a few nights, and this heater could help keep him from moving in as a lodger. 😂 Thanks mate.
I am sorry you are finding it hard to get hold of mate - we do sell it in the shop here secure.workingink.co.uk/shop/working-ink-materials/activated-carbon-felt/ hope this helps
Aren't zig zag chemney prone to clogging ? It would be interesting to combine vortex rocket with the dust collector tech to collect any unburnt particles back to the fire !
A suggestion is to build the rocket stove big enough to accept fire bricks on the inside of the burn chamber and still have the internal dimensions you want and expect for the burn chamber. In other words the steel of the stove's burn chamber will need to be 4 inches wider, 4 inches higher, and 4 inches longer if you for example use 2 inch fire bricks on sides, ends, and top and bottom. There are multiple advantages of having the insulating fire bricks. First it will cause the burn chamber to be hotter during a burn causing more and faster complete burn. Second, it will preserve the steel chamber from prematurely burning out. This way you can achieve those high temperatures in the chamber and have the steel of the stove last lifetimes. Otherwise it is possible you would need to rebuild a new stove like every year if you burn hot complete burn in every burn, which is what you want and need. But you don't need to keep burning out(develop huge holes in) the steel. If a fire brick gets broke no big deal, just take it out and put a good one back in, takes 2 minutes. At some point you will want the heat to penetrate a conductive surface to radiate out into the room before it goes out the chimney. But at that point it will be that box you just made, that box obviously won't be lined with any fire bricks because that is the radiator. But the point i am making here is that at least you won't have to rebuild the entire stove, all you will need to do is build a new radiator box once in a while if it burns out and the rest of the stove will be in pristine shape. You would also line the inside of the upright flue of the L part of the chamber inside the radiator box with fire brick to preserve the entire L chamber and to ensure hi temps inside the entire chamber. But another option is to just make that top of your radiator box out of like 1 inch thick or thicker, take lifetimes to burn out. This way nothing burns out, thick steel on top of the radiator and fire bricks lining the entire inside of the entire L chamber.
Mike from mo. US here,,enjoyd your vidio! I have a wood stove and have been interested in rocket stoves...but i do wonder...how often do you stoke a rocket stove in ur home? And will they last the night? I get the idea of more efficent burn but have to have heat through the night..thank you for the vidio! Keep up the good job 😊 mike t.
Remembering of course that you have to have a working fire place and chimney, just because you have a fireplace doesn't mean there is a working chimney above it - the people in the flat upstairs may have knocked down the chimney breast ten years ago! 😉
How about a simple device that runs on Browns gas? (a gas which can be easily/cheaply produced) I reckon you would come up with a great device. A heater would be great.
Could be even more efficient if you hooked up a duct drawing outside air into the intake ? That way, the warm inside air isn't used for combustion and isn't sucked out of the room. Just thinking ...
Since they burn so hot & steel degrades, can you build a rocket heater with fire brick (like in kilns) to make it last longer? That would be an interesting comparison.
Fire brick wouldn't allow much heat to dissipate into the room, would it? What would be the point of having an indoor fire if nearly every joule of heat is exhausted out the chimney?
If you are using it as a mass heater (long-term, daily), then you would need to build out of something lasting....like cobb, firebrick, etc. If just using for camping (short term, intermittent) then metal seems fine.
I remember your ethos several months ago about upcyclling materials from domestic appliances etc ,why do we need draught when we have devices that can drive a dc fan with a compact hearth and the gaseous products feed into a heat exchanger made from drums appliance cabinets ,I'm sure you have materials to prevent oxidation ,and devise a simple feed mechanism, all you need is something to shred up the wood and feed it from a hopper into a crucible fed with air from underneath, just simplify a commercial pellet burner ,gas bottle will suffice for main burner, hope I got you thinking ? X rooby
you could certainly go that way mate - but this is really for someone who has never done anything like this before - better not to over complicate I think
A pellet stove is basically a rocket stove with a heat exchanger... very little smoke and waaay more efficient than a wood stove...you can make pellets for it too out of biomass or waste sawdust . I do😀
Used outside, I wonder if one could use an offset-fan-driven exhaust to push the exhaust, now mixed with fresh air (or just air heated by a shrouded flue) through a duct into one of the vents in the wall of one's house to heat the air under the floor, hypocaust-style, if one has an older property. It need only keep the chill away.
Reading some comment you would think the rocket stove concept is set in stone and no deviations or development shall be un punished . I have made lots of "rocket stoves over the years as I have endless scrap metals at my disposal and I simply qualify each design based on its combustion sound . If it sound like a rocket then you have created a rocket stove as far as i am concerned . The variation can certainly change the results but horses for courses isn't it ? If it burns clean and gives off the desired heat and you radiate most of the heat into the room then you have acheived the end goal . Geez I can't believe there is so much rocket stove politics! 😂
When I transition at the bottom of the bell and it will exit to the side, I try to have 400% of the cross sectional area of the riser/flue area. Allows for good flow.
I like how you just put a bit of metal around the rocket stove and put a vent for outdoors on it. Just think how much water you could heat up and use in radiators.
That would actually be a great idea! Having a water chamber on top of that top plate would help it not to burn out so quickly, which is what it is going to do like it is. It’s way too much heat for that mild steel!
I love the idea of this, would it be possible to have a box similar to what you are doing but as a u shape that wraps round three sides of the secondary burn chamber / flue not as a heater but as an interchangeable sand battery, a vestal for making fuel from plastic, and a gasifier separate boxes of course, using various size sand boxes you could have your heater on in the work shop then when you go indoors you can take the charged sand batteries in with you or jut use bricks in you could fix them together in fact you could make one of these fully modular by having one made into a hot water jacket or a three sided configuration of pipes that fitted around three sides of the stove are these ideas ridiculous or possible I am new to this world
Saw a video of a really cool burner cant find out how to link the video but here is the title to search. "Gas are no longer necessary! MULTI-FUEL BURNER from pipe for heating.
There’s a company in my town that makes a rocket stove just like the one you made here only it’s about 5 feet tall probably about 3 feet wide and it is used indoors without any box at all. Not in a fireplace either.
Could incorporating a catalytic converter somehow in the mix be beneficial Mr. Smith?🤔 One of your recent videos showing the heat retained in a catalytic converter was fascinating!🤓 Oh and just out of curiosity 😼do some people there in the UK call it a 🚙Cadillac Converter?😛
I wonder if there was a hot water jacket welded to the back of the internal flu would it create a downward draught due to temp Differance thus increasing the air flow through the appliance
Smartest thing you could do I put a heat sink, like you would find on a circuit board only made of steel, above the rocket stove and use a fan to move that heat off the heat sink into the surrounding area. Your welcome.
Your videos are appreciated, Robert. You are giving people multiple options to partially or even completely meet their energy needs in key areas. What they do with those options are completely up to them.
What the idea seems to be, if I understand what Robert is attempting, is for people to improve and refine the devices and freely share their findings/efforts so beneficial devices that work can be replicated and put to use by others. In this way, research and development can be shared by many and should result in useful, beneficial devices built from easily sourced parts that are affordable and require minimal skills for end users to assemble.
Bickering and excuses suggesting things can't be done are a part of human nature and understandable, but are usually not helpful toward achieving the end goal. Well thought out contributions/suggestions and hands-on work are what is needed to move toward the end goal, IMHO.
Toward that end, if ongoing funding based on results (partial funds released upon each step forward) could be set up for people doing the hands-on work to cover materials, the process would probably move forward a lot quicker. Perhaps something like crowd-funded grants to people who actually put in the time and effort to build these devices.
The whole concept seems to be to reduce reliance on our current systems and corporations and literally put the power in the hands of We The People.
At any rate, that's how I see it.
Yeah
Great video. Thank you! With one of these, you could have an off-grid home and heat each room as needed with one of these as long as you have a proper flue hooked up to it. That's amazing.
yes - for sure
Big help to arrange a source of outside air rather than drawing inside air...fun to see your pursuits! Ron
Awesome vid thanks for all the great info !! Looking forward to more clean burning waste oil vids
I love that you shared the @mylittlehomestead rocket mass heater. I hope you enjoyed their channel as much as I have. To anyone watching it please be careful. Have food provisions, tell your loved ones you will be unavailable for a few days, and get someone to watch your dog. Pretty much the same routine for when someone first finds this channel.
Your videos are so amazing to watch! Especially the ones about heaters, coolers, and windmills! I've been hunting all of those down in your channel to try and watch them! I really loved the Darwin's Windmill and I have a little tidbit to add to it! It's design is extremely close to ancient Persian "air conditioner"! They were basically tall square or octagonal towers that drew in air from the top, pulled it down to a aquifer or a cool tunnel underneath the house which cooled the air before the air went into the house and cooled the inside!
nie one mate cheers
@@ThinkingandTinkering cheers!
Yes, a manifold would work really well with this design. I also think a secondary mass(ie...sand ect.) for the exhaust to heat with a ceramic or terracotta side facing in toward the room to heat would be a nice add on. Nice build Rob! Baffle it too much though and it will start to get really noisy as in loud popping noises as it sucks air in. With this build probably not so much though. Great and interesting video Rob!
I think I need to specify what I was talking about. If the top of your box enclosure gets too hot this could become thermo-acoustic like the hot and cold side of a thermo-acoustic engine and making a noise as it vibrates. Chances are that your build there will not as it still is able to force air through the box well enough to overcome the pressure needed to clear the box. Cheers!
cheers mate
Thank you again Rob. Just a fair warning: If you collect too much heat and the gas temperature drops below 50C, the water in exhaust gases starts to condensate inside the chimney and can cause serious troubles. Especially if you have brick chimney.
is that not true for any fire?
@@ThinkingandTinkering Point perfectly made. (~_^)-b
@@ThinkingandTinkering It depends on the fuel. Burning 1000g wood creates about 500 - 700g of water which you don´t want to end up inside your chimney 😉
Absolutely brilliant design! I love it! Thank you and I have taken notes and this looks really good!
From your experience Robert, does a double or triple baffle really increase the heat output a lot more ??? Would you let us know as winter is coming soon.
Had one more thought Sir, how would you make a wick for a kerosine heater using carbon fiber wick material that can keep the fiberglass reinforcement for emergency shutoff of the KERO heater ??? Thank you for your time Sir too.
Scandinavian stoves have an incredible over and back flu system which extract all the heat you could incorporate this rather than the baffle plate and Retain the Rocket stove viciousness and still be able to vent it through an internal chimney
Love all the work You Do Robert
nice mate - cheers
Robert, thought it might be worth considering doing a version for people with no fireplaces by simply having the rocket stove outside and use an enclosed box or similar to what you used here but simply as a heat exchanger and use a small fan and some semi rigid expandable aluminium duct to push or pull the air inside the home via a wall vent or adapter through a window
Yeah ok lol
I have a pretty extreme idea but I need to get some two inche tube to try it. Rob you are pretty amazing and if you add a blower on the air intake it would surly help get the burn going harder
The problem with that idea is, you have to feed the thing. Who wants to stay out there in the cold and do that? Lol
@@karlmyers6518 that mild steel wouldn’t take that kind of heat. It’s doubtful that it will last very long even being naturally aspirated as he has it.
You're probably better off heating up a sand battery and bringing that indoors.
Next, step in heating efficiency.👇
Using indoor air to fire it and venting the exhaust, pulls COLD air from outside through cracks in walls around doors, windows and whatnot into the home adding to cold drafts. The next step in efficency is to make a fresh air intake using outside air. And one can preheat the fresh air intake by running it through a portion of the exhaust. That way you loose less heat and your house is less drafty with less cold outside air being drawn around windows doors and cracks.
I see I am not the only one who sees this issue. (~_^)-b
cheers mate
The Romans constructed whole houses with these, including floor heating, and even warm swimming pools!!! There is one in York, under a pub...
I have been thinking about this for a while but ended up thinking the exhaust gases are way too hot. My brick chimney is rated for 350C.
It would be interesting if you could measure the temperature of the gases going up the chimney.
Keep up the great work
There you go Rob...
Making that Bell for the Rocket Stove...
I knew (hoped) you'd get there! 😁
lol - sooner or later mate - cheers
Hello Robert, I just want to say awesome work that you are doing. Thank you for the dedication that you have been giving. I would like to ask, what are the chances that you can get a venturi from there. That in turn can be used to generate enough power. In a sense say that the system replaces a solar power panel?
I had seen the last example Stove you showed in the video before. It's a little more complex in the fire box design as it creates a3 stage burn by allowing the pellets to begin burning on one level and as they get smaller, they fall through a grate to the second level, then again into the ash box. This is supposed to allow for continuous burning for days or months on end. Perhaps a similar feature added to your stove would be a nice feature. You might also consider a second feed box on the side for pellet feeder. This would give you multiple fuel capability.
I am not keen mate - I like stuff simple
Cracking fun what you are doing with rocket stoves and all the other heating projects! check out the rocket stove setup in Earthship homes, cobb structures etc. with the correct set up the exhaust gasses cool quickly in the outer chamber where the burn pipe IS insulated from the outer chamber and the outer chamber radiates enough heat to cool the gasses just enough, causing the exhaust to push itself through long horizontal pipes embedded in earth benches and requiring little to no traditional draft of a vertical chimney These designs have a little more detail and are great for permanent installations using the mass of the bench as a heat battery!
You can also put you're flue exit into a much larger box and create a stratification chamber to extract even more heat but expel the coolest gases up the chimney.
for sure - cheers mate
I’ve got raked ceilings, with no chimney/flue, and have been toying with the idea of getting a length of 3” stainless exhaust tube, attached to the rocket stove, bent 180’ at the top, returning to the middle of my window height with a steel panel insert to fit the window frame, and an outside flue to above the roof. All sections bolt together in about 5 minutes with standard exhaust fittings. On the inside tubing, weld on lengths of flatbar fins for increased surface area.
intersting ideas
Flue is to control draft/air flow through your fire and exhaust gases. It would do you zero good above the roofline it need to be at the top of the combustion chamber, bottom of the flue pipe/chimney pipe.
Love the video. Thank you for bringing the science and technology to within reach
glad you liked it
In a sealed room, the occupants could be in competition against the stove to get oxygen.
In a ventilated room, the cold air from outside will travel across the area, in my house, I choosed to canalise the air from outside directly into the burn chamber, the intake is thermaly insulated to avoid condensation.
I see I am not the only one who sees this issue. (~_^)-b
it's a way to go - but a little anal - all houses have ventilation - they. have to or just breathing would kill you - by ventilation we are not talking about throwing open all the doors and windows while a hurricane is blowing - ventilation is really pretty gentle stuff - having said that we each go for what we go for and it ends up being a little six or two threes
@@ThinkingandTinkering My 'house' [its doing it way too much charity to call it that] is so drafty it feels like the Vietnam era here.
Bugs crawl through holes in the walls and into the interior of the place all the time.
I literally heat with an open radiant gas heater inside with no worries about suffocation or carbon monoxide poisoning.
There's almost zero retention of heat in this place, as was the case in the house I grew up in, so suffocation is no more of a threat to me, than drowning. [I live at the top of a cliff up a steep slope, near the highest peak in 600 miles, so water can not pool here]
This is brilliant and so well explained
you could add fins to the box, increasing the surface area. just like coolers have on hot things trying to get cold.
Your right it really does help. I added them to a secondary burner on a wood stove it increased output at full burn from warm to the hairs curling on my arm. Added 2 inch fins 1-1/2 inch apart.
@@tomtaylor135 could probably also have fins on the inside also, when you increase the heat transfer is there a point where the stove puts our too little heat thru the chimney so the air thru it is not good?
that's a nice idea - cheers mate
Small piece of advice might come in handy. Taking advantage of residual heat can really come in handy especially facing these rolling blackouts. I do it all the time anyways I run off space heaters majority of the time and I use my oven as a thermal batter By simply opening the oven door and putting Myspace heater facing inward not only does it warm the air in my place but it warms the stove and the stove radiant heats to the rest of the kitchen
And it may seem dumb now... But the ancients built with rock and Historically people used stones to hold heat might be worth doing when push comes to shove
nice solution - cheers
@@cavelvlan25 My dad built a 24 ton fireplace at our old house, just so it would have a lot of thermal mass.
Since our house had next to no insulation [he was terrified of fiberglass, but somewhat rightfully so, and modern plastic insulation had not been made yet] he depended entirely on gargantuan thermal mass, and the working hands of 4 out of 5 young children to keep pumping firewood into it day and night.
It also had internal chambers to exchange that heat so that with just a small fan, this massive mountain of masonry kept a 2700 SF house decently warm in northern Arkansas, even in -5 F weather with a sheet metal roof and almost nothing for insulation.
@@hunnybunnysheavymetalmusic6542 sounds like a heck of a stove haha. Fiberglass is not fun or friendly. It is unfortunate almost all modern insulation is sky high right now I would love to insulate my place better.
@@cavelvlan25 2 super cheap kinds of insulation you can get or make: 1: plastic shopping bags [flammable, but insanely cheap, and insanely efficient], 2: aircrete. Insanely efficient, not the easiest or neatest of options, and not nearly as cheap leftover shopping bags.
PERSONALLY i would pick aircrete for the following reasons: 1: Fireproof, 2: can have flame retardant(s) added into it, 3: will not rot, 4: finds gaps that even plastic can not find, 5: has some structural value, 6: can have refractory components added to it, 7: can have waterproofing ingredients added to it, and 8: helps make a home slightly more earthquake and tornado resistant because it bonds to all of the properly prepped surfaces and makes the entire structure 'unitized' as a form of crude 'composite'.
The only things you need to do to ensure a good pour of aircrete before you pour is to 1, 'adhesion wash' all the areas you wish to bond it to. This can be done most easily with a low pressure spray wand with a swiveling head, inserted from the top or the bottom of any vertical wall, and from any end/side of a horizontal plane such as a floor. This adhesion material is also home made, and contains a mixture of the water soluble 'water glass' with some ultra fine cement powder in a light but self suspending slurry,
and
2, follow this by plugging any holes where the aircrete can leak out of when you do to pour it.
You may want to let the holes alone a few days before you put in the aircrete though, just to be sure that the preparative coating has time to harden up.
This material will partially soak into any porous surface it sticks to [which means it won't stick to very well to romex or PVC, but that might end up being a good thing, as you never know when you may need to service those] and act like a primer, to ensure that the aircrete then has an ideal surface to bond firmly to.
Once it hardens, it will greatly increase the total strength and rigidity of the structure.
THIS guy, is like THE KING of aircrete!!!
I have NEVER EVER seen ANYBODY do as much with aircrete on the face of the earth!
rocket stoves are the inital burning chamber for most mass heaters. You run the exhaust line through a large run through sand or something simmilar built into a bench or wall so as you burn during the day it holds the heat and dissapates it through the night. This is simmilar to how Siberian homes work with their small fireplaces in subzero temps
cheers mate
or do something crazy like heat water and circulate hot water around your house to distribute the heat.
thank you RMS as always your videos are kindly presented and helpful
cheers mate
I have wondered if using a cast iron pan on top of the rocket stove would have a similar effect as a cast iron wood stove does of absorbing and releasing heat from the fire inside into the room. I guess you just went a more expensive route or is it more efficient?
Insulation in the box manifold sounds quite a good idea , but how about incorporating your sand battery in some way in the manifold design .
you could do that for sure
@@ThinkingandTinkering you've got so many things spinning in my head that once I've got a workshop back i won't know where to start lol
I've built a pellet basket for mine, worst issue is overheating and flash burning the pellets...any ideas for a efficient heat sink? Should the fins be 90°, 45° down, or 45° up? Should I just perforate the feed tube? I'm getting so close to heating a home on $5 a day or less, and I can't seem to find any answers!
Always learning
for sure
Insulation isn’t necessary i’ve been burning a2 inch round rocket stove with pellets and it’s only steel it will reach About eight or 900° at its maximum and I’ve never had to replace anything on it I believe that’s because it’s allowed to cool down quicker with no insulationAnd with no insulation it still gets hot enough to burn 100% clean
A steel barrel with a clamped on top works nice as a heat distributor. It can even be opened for cleaning purposes.
I knew a boater who would circulate glycol through his back boiler using convection and then into a radiator. Normally it would be pumped to other radiators and under floor heating, but the convection radiator had to be there in case the pump failed, proving it can be done passively.
The timing of this video is great for me since I'm getting ready to build a Rocket Mass Heater for my itty-bitty mobile home.
RSM gave me a thought (again):
Would a car radiator in-line with the exhaust be piratical? I've three small aluminum ones I think I could place at the farther ends of the exhaust (or maybe a 20' side run to the bedroom). Optionally, I have access to the old steel radiators for higher heat tolerance.
Or perhaps a closed-loop water filled piping system may be more practical?
If you had lagged your inner tube to insulate it a little you would have got more draw and a cleaner burn , Don't take it as a criticism just adding to the pool of information, The hard core rocketers will run meters of pipe horizontally through a large thermal mass and need the extra pressure to achieve this, I really enjoy your vids Rob, you cover a very diverse range of topics, Cheers Brent
love your show - thank you - here's an idea - design a micro induction stove heating an insulated pot where you could stack 4-5" stainless bowls and cook a 3 course meal using a a cell phone charging battery or a car battery.
There’s a very clever rocket stove being sold in the USA called the Liberator. Worth a look.
I was wondering if someone was going to mention that! I actually just picked one up this summer and it’s rocketing away on pellets in the basement. Happy so far, little tricky to get used to depending on your draft.
The company that produces the liberator seems to actually understand Ianto Evans’ invention, unlike just about every UA-cam provider on the subject.
are you getting paid by him to mention him all the time? Larry Winiarski, Technical Director of Aprovecho, began developing the rocket stove in 1980 based on a VITA stove, designed by Sam Baldwin, and rediscovered the principles of the systems developed by the Romans in hypocaust heating and cooking systems. A stove was designed to make tortillas based on the principles of the rocket stove and won an Ashden Award in 2005. Aprovecho won the same award in 2006 for their rocket stoves. Aprovecho rocket stoves were sold in Lesotho, Malawi, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.
@@ThinkingandTinkering Me? Nope, I wish. Only bought something retail for insurance reasons.
I know you showed the rocket mass heater briefly, would have been nice if you had shown examples of fire brick & mortar foundation with a steel barrel or can, with exhaust going out the bottom and up the chimney.
Your burn tube may only last a few months, our burn tube reached 1200C easily, and we had it made of furnace materials. We built it too big for the house and had to give it away as the house approached 38C It is a fantastic way of getting rid of your waste when you get temps above 1200C there is no smoke and the chimney stays clean, topping that the amount of as in the final chamber is minimal, about 1/2 Kilo for 7 months use (2 seasons)
I used a 1/2" plate as a cooktop on my build. It got cherry red and warped something awful. My secondary air supply, an L-shaped metal tube to pre-heat the air and the upright tube to put the air up into the burn melted out in 2 weeks of steady use.
Blimey!!!
That’s almost unimaginable. Excellent work.
Mike, thanks for using the correct terminology (burn tube vs rocket stove). This video provider has yet to recognize what makes a rocket stove and the fact that a properly constructed one burns at twice the temperature (as you disclose) that his burn tubes produce. Also, the fuel consumption for a rocket stove is about half of what he describes as his experience. I have twice commented to him that he should read Ianto Evans’ book (inventor of the rocket stove) to better understand the technology.
@@terryharris3393 His model qualifies as a rocket stove. His temperatures would benefit from an insulated burn chamber, of course...but then the steel vaporizes faster. But it's a rocket, for sure...at least in my 15+ years of rocket development.
Isolation of the primary chimney may help to burn the gasses better, but for a roomheater thar can make sense only if the exhaust doesn't lead directly to the chimney but will first be lead to a radiator or some kind of 'mass' that will keep yr room warm
I'm wondering if you use thin fire bricks (like in a regular heater) to glue to the outside of the box and hopefully absorb as much heat from the gas exhaust before being extracted out the flue. Would that rating maximum heat to radiate to the room?
Does the flue have to be vertical? If it could be horizontal, many possibilities would be presented.
As always I did enjoy Thank you.
What size stove pipe are you running for your chimney out with this unit?
Hi Robert I watched your video on Rocket stove house heater,
I sent you a message about the same thing some weeks ago.
But people get so frightened when there is something Like that in there home and so they should,
the best way to do it is what The (Ramdom Farmer) does IT'S ALL OUTDOORS with very little danger, you can get bluetooth camera cheap to keep a eye 👁 on it
The heat blowing into the property is best
He is all so using Waste oil, it's a brilliant idea you should try one for your self
use old washing machines for the Box save on cost if you put a post out saying you need some.
you can also use the metal for other projects
I think you will Love it and it will make you have a good laugh 😀 it's chuckles me up when you do . By the way am 60 now
I agree with your ideas mate - but this is done for folks who have never done anything like this - so I am trying to keep it simple - but I like your idea
The Vortex Stove explored in Video # 1730 is perfect for supporting flame in a confined space and greatly reducing impingement. And the 3 curved plates circling the flame is the very best example to archive this that I have seen.
And combined with the second jacket as illustrated in Video 1741 provides a location for a copper water coil to be in the flue stream without being introduced to direct flame. This would work well just like the outdoor furnace so common in Canada. The water would be circulated into the home and through a water coil in existing ductwork for example.
Now what I haven't seen yet is the introduction of a proper WASTE OIL burner at the base complete with an auto float system that maintains a constant level in the pot and does not use the more common fuel drip system which is subject to temperature, supply tank level, and potential clogging.
Your thoughts?
So Robert a question about rocket stoves , is can it be made to work in a similar way to the vevor diesel heater that you featured in one of your video's in a similar way to what you've done on this video by fitting old motorbike cylinder's onto the manifold, then boxing them in & then fitting a fan to the box to blow air across the hot cylinder's to then vent out into the room for heating??? (Ps: also can the wasted heat from the exhaust on these diesal air heaters be captured using a similar principal to what I'm talking about here? ( Just seems such a waste of good heat from the exhaust to the outside!) Loving your videos by the way! Many thanks for the good entertaining way in which you do them! From Johnny bird up in chilly North Yorkshire!🥶🥶🍻😂🤣
One design I made was similar too Robs classical initial build but I welded 6 X 100 mm tube to the 100 mm upright . One on each side . Only spot weld every 100 mm along . This creates conductive passive air flow for the room . The burn chamber went up 1.5 m and back down and out . It created a lot of heat and it was open plan living . Certainly wasn't a set and forget relaxing fire though . The burn rate was every ten minute with dry hardwood but man did that thing get hot . I ended up putting it out in the shed as it was not a practical design for in the house . A bigger fire area for larger pieces would be better for that like a arm size peice .
The horizontal part of the stove needs to be longer, because the smoke will stay in the flame longer, giving more smoke the chance to burn, causing more heat, and the riser needs to be round with the incoming fire, heat, and any smoke to enter off center which causes a swirl, so instead of everything just rising up, any remaining smoke has more time to burn, allowing for more heat.
Thanks to your channel I am thinking of a big rocket stove enveloped with a 2 ton'ish sand battery with a water heat exchanger plumbed into my underfloor heating. In Scotland we are using £3-£5 per day on heating only, our worst was £7.30 in 24 hours. If it wasn't for my O.A.P parents and Mum being disabled I would turn the bloody heating off.
And we are not even in the depths or winter yet.
All very, very frightening.
All very interesting, but I as many would have to undertake some major renovation work to open up my fireplace and chimney. Many homes simply won't have these built in to their homes. Like someone else commented. It would be useful to see what you could come up with for an external stove. Although less convenient to keep fuelled up, would be easier to install.
How could we transfer heat to our existing heating system, such as a boiler and radiators. Is it possible?
it's more than possible and actually pretty easy just think of a current hot water heating system or forced air system - the principles are all there
You can use ceramic tiles as the insulator for the jacket.
Hi Robert. I love your work and videos. You inspired me to build my own rocket stove. I can see that some of them have wood inlet welded on the side of the chimney and other on the top of the horizontal air tunel. Could you please explain the advantages of both solutions? Is there any particular reason to choose one of the solutions? Cheers!
there is no real reason though I am guessing there are lots of arguments why one is better than another - I just dis agree with that - if I were you and this was my first time would just go for one you candid easily and run sufficiently
@@ThinkingandTinkering Thank you. I will weld the wood feed on the air tunel - it'll give me more space for an additional "shell" on the chimney. Have a nice day!
I've seen the same type of set up made into a thermal mass heater using a 40 gallon drum and stones or bricks around the flue, but not sure how easy they would be to clean.👍
If the Rocket stove is built correctly, then it burns so clean, that there is virtually nothing left behind. That said, a lot of "rocket mass heaters" have built cleaning ports into their designs.. "Just in Case". The ones Im talking about, tend to use a long bench that the exhaust pipe runs through... which stores the heat into the benches mass. People put some thick padding on top of it, and can sit or lay down on it.
@@johndough8115 👍
maybe a cleaning port?
Another way is to use heat exchangers on each end. Pipe the heat into the house with copper or aluminum tubing. Fire outside, radiator inside. Oil or water might work.
Hi Robert.. would love to see you guys make a wind up clockwork auger for automatic feeding of pellets...wouldn't know where to start with a windup project but its an engineering skill that needs to be re-introduced.
buy a large wood auger bit, place in a suitable tube and there's your feed mechanism
@@richardkern5185 damn... That's half of it. But the clockwork bit is of interest to me. Windup clockwork that takes out the electric or so called gravity fed.
It doesn't have to be anything super complex. Put a mass on a chain and hang it from a gear. Put a ratchet on the gear so the mass drags the gear along, but you can pull the other end of the chain to raise the mass without reversing the gear.
Then connect the gear to another one driving the auger with an appropriate gear ratio and you're all set.
A bit of experimenting to get the weight and gear ratios just right, but shouldn't be too hard. I imagine you can get most of the parts you need from a bicycle, you'll just need much longer chains.
@@DevinBaillie food for thought. Like the ratchet idea. I suppose the challenge comes from timing and control.
I really enjoy your videos, even if some of them, such as this rocket stove and its indoor adaptor, are way beyond my skillsets.
I am hoping to have a go at your Homemade Heater, the one in 1702, but I've hit a snag. It's this 100% carbon felt you use for the wick, I just can't find this stuff anywhere. I did find a 98% carbon felt, but you emphasise in the video, to make sure its 100%.
I even sent your shop a message, asking if any of the material you sell was what I'm looking for; none of your listings that I can see mentions anything about 100% carbon felt. Unfortunately, I received no answer to my query, maybe you overlooked it, so I'm asking here the same question, is there any material on your website that is 100% carbon felt, by another name.
I do hope you'll help me with this, Jack Frost has already been peering through the windows a few nights, and this heater could help keep him from moving in as a lodger. 😂
Thanks mate.
I am sorry you are finding it hard to get hold of mate - we do sell it in the shop here secure.workingink.co.uk/shop/working-ink-materials/activated-carbon-felt/
hope this helps
How do you cut a 100mm circular hole in sheet steel?
Thanks! This was what we were waiting for!
Aren't zig zag chemney prone to clogging ?
It would be interesting to combine vortex rocket with the dust collector tech to collect any unburnt particles back to the fire !
A suggestion is to build the rocket stove big enough to accept fire bricks on the inside of the burn chamber and still have the internal dimensions you want and expect for the burn chamber. In other words the steel of the stove's burn chamber will need to be 4 inches wider, 4 inches higher, and 4 inches longer if you for example use 2 inch fire bricks on sides, ends, and top and bottom.
There are multiple advantages of having the insulating fire bricks. First it will cause the burn chamber to be hotter during a burn causing more and faster complete burn. Second, it will preserve the steel chamber from prematurely burning out. This way you can achieve those high temperatures in the chamber and have the steel of the stove last lifetimes. Otherwise it is possible you would need to rebuild a new stove like every year if you burn hot complete burn in every burn, which is what you want and need. But you don't need to keep burning out(develop huge holes in) the steel. If a fire brick gets broke no big deal, just take it out and put a good one back in, takes 2 minutes.
At some point you will want the heat to penetrate a conductive surface to radiate out into the room before it goes out the chimney. But at that point it will be that box you just made, that box obviously won't be lined with any fire bricks because that is the radiator. But the point i am making here is that at least you won't have to rebuild the entire stove, all you will need to do is build a new radiator box once in a while if it burns out and the rest of the stove will be in pristine shape. You would also line the inside of the upright flue of the L part of the chamber inside the radiator box with fire brick to preserve the entire L chamber and to ensure hi temps inside the entire chamber.
But another option is to just make that top of your radiator box out of like 1 inch thick or thicker, take lifetimes to burn out. This way nothing burns out, thick steel on top of the radiator and fire bricks lining the entire inside of the entire L chamber.
Awesome 👏
cheers mate
Mike from mo. US here,,enjoyd your vidio! I have a wood stove and have been interested in rocket stoves...but i do wonder...how often do you stoke a rocket stove in ur home? And will they last the night? I get the idea of more efficent burn but have to have heat through the night..thank you for the vidio! Keep up the good job 😊 mike t.
I have a couple of old laboratory incubators if you can do anything with them
Remembering of course that you have to have a working fire place and chimney, just because you have a fireplace doesn't mean there is a working chimney above it - the people in the flat upstairs may have knocked down the chimney breast ten years ago! 😉
How about a simple device that runs on Browns gas? (a gas which can be easily/cheaply produced) I reckon you would come up with a great device. A heater would be great.
Pretty close to being finished just need outside make up air lol thanks for all your hard work and soon you will be a welder.
just got to keep practicing mate
Could be even more efficient if you hooked up a duct drawing outside air into the intake ? That way, the warm inside air isn't used for combustion and isn't sucked out of the room. Just thinking ...
Thank, you for you're video
I read somewhere that a mass rocket heater needs a flue 3x the length of the burn chamber. Would this help the draw?
I have been pondering this mate
I'm curious how it will perform with Anthracite? Maybe some slight modifications by adding a "grid" and ash pan.
Since they burn so hot & steel degrades, can you build a rocket heater with fire brick (like in kilns) to make it last longer? That would be an interesting comparison.
Fire brick wouldn't allow much heat to dissipate into the room, would it?
What would be the point of having an indoor fire if nearly every joule of heat is exhausted out the chimney?
this seems to be a bot of a recurring theme mate - I think I will do a video on this as you ask a very good question
If you are using it as a mass heater (long-term, daily), then you would need to build out of something lasting....like cobb, firebrick, etc. If just using for camping (short term, intermittent) then metal seems fine.
I remember your ethos several months ago about upcyclling materials from domestic appliances etc ,why do we need draught when we have devices that can drive a dc fan with a compact hearth and the gaseous products feed into a heat exchanger made from drums appliance cabinets ,I'm sure you have materials to prevent oxidation ,and devise a simple feed mechanism, all you need is something to shred up the wood and feed it from a hopper into a crucible fed with air from underneath, just simplify a commercial pellet burner ,gas bottle will suffice for main burner, hope I got you thinking ? X rooby
you could certainly go that way mate - but this is really for someone who has never done anything like this before - better not to over complicate I think
Does the chamber fill with creosote?
A pellet stove is basically a rocket stove with a heat exchanger... very little smoke and waaay more efficient than a wood stove...you can make pellets for it too out of biomass or waste sawdust . I do😀
I have wondered about that. I would be interested to know how you make the pellets.
cheers mate
Cast the whole thing inside a block of refractory cement and you get a thermal storage heater..
Thank you :)
You're welcome!
The booster air holes are not necessary either a ash hole is a good addition though for a less maintenance stove
Very indianuitive Mr Chuckle ;)
Used outside, I wonder if one could use an offset-fan-driven exhaust to push the exhaust, now mixed with fresh air (or just air heated by a shrouded flue) through a duct into one of the vents in the wall of one's house to heat the air under the floor, hypocaust-style, if one has an older property. It need only keep the chill away.
you certainly could do something along those lines
I wonder if a bunch of screws or thick nails welded into the box half in half out would make much of a difference with the extra surface area?
I doubt it - not for the work involved but you could try it if you like
Reading some comment you would think the rocket stove concept is set in stone and no deviations or development shall be un punished . I have made lots of "rocket stoves over the years as I have endless scrap metals at my disposal and I simply qualify each design based on its combustion sound . If it sound like a rocket then you have created a rocket stove as far as i am concerned . The variation can certainly change the results but horses for courses isn't it ? If it burns clean and gives off the desired heat and you radiate most of the heat into the room then you have acheived the end goal . Geez I can't believe there is so much rocket stove politics! 😂
I would use no insulation, I would cover the chamber in clay and stones for structure to accumulate the heat and emit the heat over a longer time.
Build this into your sand battery and you are all set!
When I transition at the bottom of the bell and it will exit to the side, I try to have 400% of the cross sectional area of the riser/flue area. Allows for good flow.
Instead of using insulation can you use an aluminum geopolymer impregnated with pumice
Your the man!
lol- cheers
I like how you just put a bit of metal around the rocket stove and put a vent for outdoors on it. Just think how much water you could heat up and use in radiators.
That would actually be a great idea! Having a water chamber on top of that top plate would help it not to burn out so quickly, which is what it is going to do like it is. It’s way too much heat for that mild steel!
loads mate
I love the idea of this, would it be possible to have a box similar to what you are doing but as a u shape that wraps round three sides of the secondary burn chamber / flue not as a heater but as an interchangeable sand battery, a vestal for making fuel from plastic, and a gasifier separate boxes of course, using various size sand boxes you could have your heater on in the work shop then when you go indoors you can take the charged sand batteries in with you or jut use bricks in you could fix them together in fact you could make one of these fully modular by having one made into a hot water jacket or a three sided configuration of pipes that fitted around three sides of the stove are these ideas ridiculous or possible I am new to this world
Saw a video of a really cool burner cant find out how to link the video but here is the title to search. "Gas are no longer necessary! MULTI-FUEL BURNER from pipe for heating.
There’s a company in my town that makes a rocket stove just like the one you made here only it’s about 5 feet tall probably about 3 feet wide and it is used indoors without any box at all. Not in a fireplace either.
Could incorporating a catalytic converter somehow in the mix be beneficial Mr. Smith?🤔 One of your recent videos showing the heat retained in a catalytic converter was fascinating!🤓 Oh and just out of curiosity 😼do some people there in the UK call it a 🚙Cadillac Converter?😛
If a rocket stove is well insulated and burning at the correct temperature, there should be basically nothing left to catalyze.
I guess you could and I have never heard that
I wonder if there was a hot water jacket welded to the back of the internal flu would it create a downward draught due to temp Differance thus increasing the air flow through the appliance
I don't know - interesting question though
I take it that a good rocket design does NOT produce creosote ...
True or false?
Smartest thing you could do I put a heat sink, like you would find on a circuit board only made of steel, above the rocket stove and use a fan to move that heat off the heat sink into the surrounding area. Your welcome.
lol - cheers mate
As a complete newbie, I was hoping to see you show it in a chimney indoors.
I don't have a chimney or I would
Some non-insulating firebrick, on the front and sides of the box would store heat that would be radiated out even after the actual fire burns out.
for sure mate
amazing. I hate that I never learned to weld.
It’s never too late! A very valuable skill and not that hard to learn.
it's really easy to pick up mate especially these days - those welders can be piked up for a few bucks!