Alternative fuels for RMH

Greetings!  I was reading this thread on making your own ceramic filters using clay and coffee grounds.  The title is a bit misleading: you don't put the cow dung in the clay mixture; you used the dried cow dung to fire the clay.  According to the different links, cow dung burns "hotter than wood" -- about  950*C, or between 1,652 and  1,742*F after about an hour.

Given how hot a well-designed RMH can get (I recall reading one experiment where the person managed to melt the aluminum he was using in the burn chamber, i.e., his fire got to at least 1,000*F), I'm curious if anyone has done any experiments on using biomass other than wood in their RMH?  IOW, burning dried cow dung, dried horse dung, bundles of grass, charcoal, the bones of your enemies (finely chopped up, of course, and dried), that goat-cheese-and-tomato-bruschetta-pizza your girlfriend tried to feed you -- whatever is organic that might feed the fire.

Muzhik McCoy wrote:
Given how hot a well-designed RMH can get (I recall reading one experiment where the person managed to melt the aluminum he was using in the burn chamber, i.e., his fire got to at least 1,000*F), I'm curious if anyone has done any experiments on using biomass other than wood in their RMH? 

Same questions on my mind. Searching the archives only brought up this.


I've experimented with burning leaves in my brick mock-up, and they burn fast and hot. Aside from the issue of constant feeding, are there any other drawbacks to using them?


What bout using Candy? Seems like an energy-rich fuel, and waste candy is available to me in quantity.


Update: Oh, and what about sawdust - Can get tons of sawdust.

Somewhere someone has burned just about everything in a stove.

If you could build a RMH that can burn pellets reliably without catching the storage bin on fire, then you are on the way to burning many biomass waste stream.

I have seen a few zero-power, no auger pellet stoves, but not very many.