Hello everyone. This is my first post on this group. I have become extremely intrigued by rocket mass heaters after coming across the various videos on YouTube which eventually led me here.
I live in a typical urban town in Alberta Canada that I recently moved to almost a year ago. As such, my house is a newly built approximately 2200 square foot two story. We are on a forced air natural gas system for heat, but I am looking for redundancies in case of an emergency. This brings me to my questions.
1. If I put a rocket mass heater in the basement, how well could it heat the house, especially up to the second story given the tight insulation of modern builds.
2. We are close to the mountains and are prone to vast temperature swings in the winter. We’ve already had problems with thawing behind the basement insulation which has caused mold that the builders are in the middle or remediating. Once they fix it, how would I run the chimney out without disturbing the insulation and therefore inviting more potential mold problems in the future? Does spray foam work to insulate around the chimney or could that be a potential fire hazard given the flammability of spray foam?
