Austin Shackles

Burra drew my attention to this thread and we had a quick thinky (as I do most of the cooking when we're both here) - I could easy enough knock up a nice quick pasta dish with basil from the garden, onions, mushroom, peppers and so on which we ordinarily have al the time.  The tomato sauce in bottles from Lidl turns out to be vegan when I check although I don't think it's labelled as such but there aren't any animal products on the list.  Or I mostly have fresh tomato in the fridge anyway.  Or I could do a veggie curry if I cooked the rice specifically: we often have cooked rice read but that isn't vegan as Burra puts "skinny bits" in it for collagen to help are increasingly aging joints.  But there's plenty of uncooked rice and it doesn't take that long to cook.  We also mostly have frozen cooked beans or chickpeas in the freezer.

On mine I was building pretty much exact to Matt's plans with the focus on making the internal spaces the right size; since the bricks I can get here are not quite the same size as the US ones the outside dimensions differ a bit.  As I have no reason to suppose I need to take it apart completely, I used some bought-in refractory mortar which is, I believe, used to make brick ovens and barbeques to build the body of the stove.  The last couple of layers are done with sand-clay mix so I can get the top off for maintenance should it be needed.  I've also got a tube of some fire cement stuff which I think is intended for sealing metal flue pipes and the like.  That's proved handy for replacing some of the top-edge bricks which didn't want to stay put with the clay-sand mix.  To be fair, I made snazzy 45° angles on the front corners which means small triangular brick cuts which don't have much area to bond to

I'll be interested in your results with clay and sharp sand.  On my build, because I didn't have any sharp sand to hand the parts that are done with clay mortar (mostly the internals of the core firebox and the top layers of the stove casing, the latter so it can be got apart if needed)... Those parts are clay mortar made with what is locally called yellow sand which is what you would normally use for rendering, not bricklaying.  It proved not all that good and it tends to come apart too easily.

The most part of the stove casing is done with some bought-in refractory mortar which I think they sell for building brick ovens.  That means I can't dismantle it easily but then I have no intention of doing that, I'm more concerned with longevity. I can access the core by lifting the top off the stove, if I need to.  In fact I did end up needing to as a couple of the firebricks cracked and had to be repaired.  I don't know if they are inferior quality or if that was just bad luck.

before I put the lid on it, here's a picture of the adaptation at the back of the stove to connect to the as-yet-virtual bench.  Space considerations meant that this space is a bit tight.  On the right is the inlet* for hot air from the stove, and on the left the outlet to the base of the flue.  The outlet part looks constricted but actually it's not, the ports in the stove body are about 8x6" (20x15 cm approx) and that outlet at the narrowest part is about 16x3" so in fact it's the same size.  Since the chimney is 6" / 15cm inside diameter anyway, none of this restricts it excessively.  



Yet to decide if I divide the bench lengthwise until part way along so that the warm/hot gases from the stove are constrained to go along the bench further before they can go off down the exit.  Probably not needed, but also, not a great deal of work to achieve, I just need to extend that central divider some.  The bench will be a strat chamber not a mass, at least to begin with.

* if you're the bench, it's the inlet...

Just to add I'm trying to create a distinction between "batch" and "burn".  The way I see it, when you fill up the firebox with fuel and light it that is a batch, and that's what distinguishes a batch-rocket (stove) from something like a J-tube where you feed it little and often.

A "burn" is composed of 1 or more batches and is the time during which the stove is alight until you decide not to feed it any more.  This, I think, conforms to the idea of a "burn" in a J-tube.  And if it doesn't, I'd like it to.  So for example you could do a 1½-hr burn in a batch stove which used 3 or 4 batches, and after that the stove and bench would all be nice and hot for the rest of the day/night.

You're doing way more experimental dry-stack than I did!  I basically just built it, making sure the internal spaces in the core and within the body came out right using the bricks I could source.  However, you're planning things like water heating which I didn't do.

As for storing heat, you store heat in the hot water and I assume your hot water tank is inside the house. If you find you want more heat in the stove body/bench then you can just burn another batch of wood.  Without the bench on mine I found that more than 3 consecutive batches (i.e. one fire-box stacked with wood) started to overheat the chimney, so was wasting fuel.  I expect/hope that with the strat-chamber bench which I'm adding this year, I will be able to to do an extra batch or two without losing too much heat.

At the base of my chimney is a single-skinned 45° bend before it switches to double-skin going through the wall.  During the first and second batches on each burn that bend is merely warm to the touch, showing that the flue temperature is nice and low and the heat is remaining mostly in the stove.  At the end of the third batch it starts to get hotter although you can still touch it without burning yourself.  At that point I usually let the fire go out, since burning any more would send too much heat up the chimney.

It's very like my situation living in Portugal.  I don't speak the language especially well as I've only been here about 8 years.  

If I want to write a post for a Portuguese-speaking forum it's much easier for me to write it in English.

What I do is to write in English and then use google translate or other online translator to translate it, but then I read through it in Portuguese and see if I think it looks like it makes sense.  If I'm in doubt over the translation, then I translate it back to English to see if it looks right.  I wouldn't use "AI" to edit something as it's too prone to add stuff I don't want.

Here's an anecdote about translation.  I used to play a multi-player online game where you spent about 6 weeks building up to a final phase.  In the final phase, in order to succeed, your team had to work very well as a team and follow instructions exactly.  We constantly had a problem where one player failed to do this.  Well, it turned out that he was from Egypt and spoke almost no English, his native tongue was Arabic.  After a quite a bit of playing with google translate back and forth form English to Arabic I managed to explain the issue and give him some basic help with how the "endgame" worked.  The trick of copying what the translator put out (I, obviously, can't read Arabic) and re-translating that to see if it made any sense was definitely useful!

Here's the thread for our build in case you haven't yet found it.

Matt Walker tiny stove build

There's a fair bit in there and quite a lot of Q and A.   It's a pretty standard build without any water heating or such, the only slight difference is it's mirrored compared to the plans.

If you don't have the size bricks that are in the plans, you need to start by getting the internal sizes of the core correct (my core is also built with firebricks), then make the stove body contain the core including insulation space around it, and then also make sure the internal passages in the stove are right.

The bench inlet/outlet are at the bottom of the stove.  Bench inlet (form the stove) is at the back of the descending flue (on the left in my build), bench outlet is at the base of the chimney.  On the plans, these are marked as optional if you don't plan to add a bench.
I'm reliably informed that it works as-is, but it's also possible to place a brick over the outlet from the bottom "oven" space into the flue so as to push more heat into the bench.  I'll be (finally) building the bench for ours soon, so no doubt there will be a few more posts added about that.

I kinda like that Tesla were deliberately not influenced by style in making the cybertruck.  

Have to admit I did wonder when the first hints about a new truck came out if someone was gonna donate a Rivian, which I'd have to admit given free choice I would get - I love that Rivian, a non-car-maker start-up could make something so good (based on the reviews I've seen) and in that way put a boot up the rear end of the major car makers to get their own battery trucks in production (such as the F150 Lightning for example)

It's kinda like Tesla itself was when they made the first Roadster - a non-car company made a genuinely good electric sports car and set a marker for the regular car makers to aim at.  And look where Tesla is now, I see quite a number of them here in rural Portugal even.

Here's to many years of no-smoking transport!

Burra Maluca wrote:

Connie Graham wrote:What I'm stuck on is connecting the tanks so I can gravity feed them for topping up ... As in the type of fittings that will allow me to connect pipes/hoses between them - I don't know what to look for or what kind of seals etc.

I just went up to the terrace above the house to take some photos in case they help.

If you need more technical info I'll have to twist Austin's arm to reply when he gets home but I'm hoping the photos will help you a bit.

Just a couple of points.  You can get a proper fitting for attaching the pipe to the tank, but I didn't have one handy so the ones with all the sealant are just a short stub of HDPE pipe pushed into a hole and sealed up with some "especial nautico" sealer - this one is made by Fischer but the key term is "MS polymer" and the particular thing about it is it can be used on wet surfaces.

The proper fitting has to be inserted from inside the tank which can be tricky, and has a big nut to hold it in place.  But it may overall be better/easier.  Those overflow pipes have no pressure on them, being overflows.  It wouldn't work with just sealer if there was any pressure on it.



For the curious: The complicated-looking device on the feed into the tanks is in fact a level control.  The water mine has a wall and fills up about 2ft/60cm deep with water and since it's supposedly about 30m long (think mine adit) into the hillside it holds quite a bit of water.  There's an outlet pipe from the mine which is about 8"/20cm above the floor inside so it's above the sediment level.   That runs to the tanks.  It splits part way and one leg goes to our house tank which is underground and fed through a float valve.  The other leg goes to the 2 IBCs.  The feed goes up above tank level and then back down into the tank - the level where it turns back down is the water level in the mine; by moving the whole thing up and down I can vary the level in the mine.  On top is a vent so it can't air lock, with a small filter so bugs can't go in.   The tanks sit in the sun but that's not an issue as there's a constant flow of water through them which keeps them cool.  

The pipes by the house:  one runs direct from the mine and is used for watering and other such uses, the upper one with the filter part way along is from the tank behind the house and goes inside.  There's also a pump to make the shower work and a cross connection (the blue in-line tap) which allows me to use the pump to reverse flow water from the tank back to the mine to flush the pipe if needed.  As the flow is quite slow from the mine especially in summer it can sometimes get sediment in the pipe which restricts the flow.  It also gets gas trapped in it by some means which defies logic as that should escape from the vent.  I've no idea where the gas is from, the whole pipe from the mine to the tank is below water level normally, it can't draw air in.