Seattle Area Rocket Stove Mass Heater Workshop - Aug 21-23!

Hot off the press!! Erica and Ernie Wisner, http://www.ernieanderica.info, will be in the Seattle area (Maltby/Snohomish) to teach their amazing Rocket Stove Mass Heater Workshop (updated 6/4/09 with new dates:) Friday eve August 21, through Sunday, August 23rd!

For links to youtube videos and a discussion of these amazing things on this forum, see this thread.

More details to follow!!

[size=14pt]"Rocket" Stoves and Mass Heaters[/size]

[size=12pt]

[li]Get Hot in a Good Way[/li]
[li]Build Beautiful Functional Earthen Art[/li]
[li]Play With Fire[/li]
[li]Eat, Drink, and Be Muddy![/li]

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When: Friday eve through Sunday, August 21-23, 2009

Where: near Snohomish, WA at Wise Earth Ecological Landtrust (WEEL).  Directions and address provided with course registration.

What:  "Rocket Stoves" are super-efficient, wood-burning heaters.  They use a fraction of the wood required by a woodstove, and provide steady, comfortable heat just where you need it.

Join us for 3 days of hands-on fun!
- Build and test super-efficient woodstoves with your own hands, use earth-friendly natural and recycled materials.
- Play with fire like never before: make flames burn sideways and smoke disappear.
- Brush up your bricklaying skills, turn mud into earthen masonry.
- Explore creative heating solutions to suit your situation, local biofuels, and safety needs.

At the end of this workshop, you will have all the skills you need to build a Pocket Rocket or Rocket Mass Heater from available materials.

Recommended Reading: Rocket Mass Heaters, Superefficient Woodstoves YOU Can Build! by Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson.  Available at www.rocketstoves.com, or by mail-order from Cob Cottage Company, Coquille OR.

Instructors:

Ernie Wisner is a builder, mariner, forest-fire fighter, and veteran instructor with Cob Cottage Company, TrackersNW, and Portland's Village Building Convergence.

Erica Wisner is a freelance writer, artist, and science educator who has worked with OMSI, Cascadia Wild, and The City Repair Project.

As a team we entertain the brain, satisfy the senses, get your body moving, and foster creativity, understanding, and confidence.

Fees: $195.00 if registered by August 2nd, $225.00 after; $10.00 discount for WEEL residents or past WEEL workshop participants.

Contact: Jocelyn Campbell, joce@jocelynsevents.com, 206.779.3707.

Imagine: nearly smokeless wood (renewable) heat for your home that uses 1/4th the wood of regular wood stoves!

See my article (with videos) at http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp

The "erica" in the video is the same erica that hangs out here sometimes and is the same erica that will be teaching this class!

I'll be there!

Registration forms are now available at http://www.jocelynsevents.com/rocketstove/!

Mass heaters (cob benches) don't just heat, they cool, too! Per Erica:

The neat thing about a thermal-mass stove is that the mass serves as a heat-sink to cool the house in summer, too.  Like adobe.  There's a 20+ degree difference between outside and inside in our house today.

Here's a flier to show your friends and family!

So is this one that is friday night to sunday afternoon?  Like the one we went to last winter?

Yes, it starts Friday evening at 7:00 pm and goes until about 4:00 pm on Sunday.  After seeing how virtually smokeless these are at Cob Cottage in Oregon, it continues to amaze me that people think pellet stoves or EPA certified wood stoves are the environmental choice. Rocket stoves are a much, much healthier option!

Don't forget that the cob bench cools in the summer, too! Whew, we could use it this week!

Paul Wheaton, i think i wrote on some forum here that you should watch your own video, a bit silly isn't it . i saw that video on making a rocket stove a short while ago but before i started writting on the pèrmaculture  forums, i found it on youtube.
I find these videos in a away hard to watch, easy enough but if i want to really understand how things are made i often have to watch videos a lot of times. It looks easy and then its sort of hard work or time consuming, which is the same. Sometimes its so hard to see whats going on that i get exhausted just because it makes me tense.
    I need to see things first to find out what they're on about and where they're going and then when i know what they are going to tell me, to understand how its done and then to see some detail that i slowly realised was important though at first i had not thought worth paying much attention to. SOme times i have to look for other articles to know enough to understand thhe first one and come back to the first article or video when i know more.
    No  one told me when I was a child that studying is sort of slow and stupid and so i want to tell people, in case no one told them, things always feel stupid if they're slow, if your know a lot about something already its quick and feels intelligent . Rose.

Erica,

Will you be doing some rumford stuff on friday night? 

rose macaskie wrote:
Paul Wheaton, i think i wrote on some forum here that you should watch your own video, a bit silly isn't it .

Rose,

We are all stumbling along trying to make the best of things.  If you asked me to watch my own videos, I probably interpreted as something else.  No worries.

I find these videos in a away hard to watch, easy enough but if i want to really understand how things are made i often have to watch videos a lot of times.

That's where the workshop is far better than the video.  When you put your hand over the fire and it is different than you expected, and when you smash dirt with straw and sand and it looks stupid and then suddenly turns into something different ...  and when you see the fire burn sideways and hear it being "rockety"  .... it's so different in person.

The video can only put the idea in your head.

Paul wheaton, i need to see videos of how much wood they put in those stoves .
      To go deeper into the need to see the fire for a while the following.  When i was a child i was told how to make a fire, i was taught how to make it burn fiercer and  if the flame got too high how to stop things going so well and so, without really thinking, i learnt what was considered right for a open hearth type fire but i would not have a clue what was to much or too little for these fires.

    Will you video you or other speakers, in the big washington meeting of permies. Videos are pretty hard work, i suppose that reporting on subjects is easier than taking and editing videos.

  Obama's worried about ecological questions, shouldn't he be working on norms for rocket and masonry stoves so people can use less fuel and produce nearly no smoke. Get on to him. agri rose macaskie.

paul wheaton wrote:
Erica,

Will you be doing some rumford stuff on friday night?   

Yes, we like to go over a variety of ways to play with fire, to get people comfortable and familiar with the various factors at play. 

The Rumford fireplace is one of the more interesting and efficient versions of fireplace that we know about.  Not completely clean or efficient, but a vast improvement over most other masonry fireplaces. 
We also do a little bit on cooking fires, ovens, chimneys, masonry heaters, etc.  Anybody who has an innovative wood-burning stove or camp cookstove is welcome to bring it, or pictures, for show-and-tell.

Due to a health emergency, we moved the venue for this workshop at the 11th hour. Despite this shake up, Ernie and Erica, the instructors, the new hosts, Jeni and Gordon, along with all the participants, pulled together a brand new plan that was executed with professionalism, warmth, humor and a boatload of learning! We built a fantastic rocket stove mass heater to heat the soil in a solar greenhouse.

I just wanted to publicly thank each and everyone involved in this workshop for pulling together to make it a rousing success!

Thank you and cheers to each of you!