Uncle Mud Rocket Heater and Bench Combo for a Tinyhouse or Trailer

We wanted to give you all a quick tour of our latest test bench with the wonderful Gamera Rocket Heater: Together they make a Rocket Mass Heater suitable for a tinyhouse or mobile home or treehouse or other place where you need to store heat over night without catching a wood floor on fire or breaking something because the mass bench was too heavy for the floor.

So guess you had a lot of steel plate supporting that unknown cob plaster that is very thin.  Cute fan.  So just testing a model.

These are half barrels connected in a 9' x 9' L shape filled with about 12 inches of cob with a 6 inch stove pipe running through it. No plate steel, no thin cob.

That is one beautiful bench, the form and function come together so well!
Did you have the legs left over from buying kits and just using the doors?

I use the cast iron pipe flanges in those barrel stove kits to build my CottageRocket tiny house heaters so I have  lot of those cast iron legs left over.

A couple months ago we showed you the end results of our cob mass bench build that lets us put Rocket Heaters in tiny houses and rooms with raised wood floors. Laine Wyldling has finished editing a video showing the steps of the build.

Many thanks to our generous patrons at https://patreon.com/unclemud please consider joining them for as little as $1 per month. You'll get access to more great more great fire and mud resources.  

0:00 Introduction
0:15 Preparations
0:20 New Floor
0:35 Skylight
0:59 Barrels
1:10 Cutting a 45 on a Barrel
1:45 Plans
1:59 Stovepipe Layout & Cobbing
2:33 Beginning to Dry
2:50 Overview
3:30 Gamera Rocket Heater
4:20 Closing Remarks

I have a Liberator Rocket Heater that I was planning on paring with a similar style 9' straight bench.  How has this half-barrel bench worked in the long term?  Still happy with it?  Just listened to Paul Wheaton and Matt Walker's RMH Smackdown where they mention they don't recommend running the exhaust out the end of the bench any more.  

Any feedback would be greatly helpful!

To add some context to my situation - I have had the Liberator for 6 years now sitting in my basement and finally have the timber frame addition to install it in.  I had the floor joists designed to handle the weight of a masonry heater (basically, the engineers designed it to carry a 3x3x12 chunk of concrete).  I am restricted by where the beams are for the location of the chimney.  I could put the Liberator on either side of the bench, but the side with the chimney would require the pipe in the bench to do 180 degrees, right?  

Mud's half-barrel design seemed to be simple and forgiving for a beginner.  

B Haring wrote:I have a Liberator Rocket Heater that I was planning on paring with a similar style 9' straight bench.  How has this half-barrel bench worked in the long term?  Still happy with it?  Just listened to Paul Wheaton and Matt Walker's RMH Smackdown where they mention they don't recommend running the exhaust out the end of the bench any more.  

Any feedback would be greatly helpful!

To add some context to my situation - I have had the Liberator for 6 years now sitting in my basement and finally have the timber frame addition to install it in.  I had the floor joists designed to handle the weight of a masonry heater (basically, the engineers designed it to carry a 3x3x12 chunk of concrete).  I am restricted by where the beams are for the location of the chimney.  I could put the Liberator on either side of the bench, but the side with the chimney would require the pipe in the bench to do 180 degrees, right?  

Mud's half-barrel design seemed to be simple and forgiving for a beginner.  

The half barrel design is an excellent pairing with the relatively low power output of the Liberstor (about 30k btu per hour max). My experience is that the Liberator doesn't produce enough heat to warm a whole 3x3x12 mass so it never gets warm enough to heat the house well. If you surround a heat exchange pipe or barrel with too much mass it starts behaving more like an insulator. I also like to exit my chimney through the top of the bench leaving the horizontal capped end of the tee exposed for easy priming and cleaning. --Mud