Rocket Mass Heater beats moisture & mold?

Hi all,
I recently bought a house in the Central Portuguese hills around Coimbra. We're going to do some renovations and I'm looking at retrofitting some sustainable solutions innovations into it. Now the winters in Portugal tend to be humid and because many houses have poor isolation, humidity levels indoors are high. This leads to somewhat unhealthy air and moldy spots on walls in corners and around the windows mainly. You see that central heating systems - however fuelled - are able to nicely heat the house and with that keep humidity out and so the air and walls clear from mold. My question is... will a rocket mass heater be able to do the same? Do people have experience with this?

It is a concern for us as my 9yo boy seems to have sensitive lungs and reacts to the humidity and moldy air. I can put a purifier in the room, but rather prevent it from happening instead of trying to repair it after....

Hope to hear what some of you have experienced...! Cheers
Jip

Hi Jip,

Welcome to Permies.

Hello Jip and welcome as well!
Any wood stove that I grew up with always needed to have a pot of water on the top in order to humidify the air since the woodstove always took a lot of moisture out of the air.
A rocket mass heater is no exception to this. My RMH always kept the windows dry and mold-free where air was allowed to circulate.

I will say that a RMH will most certainly help drive cold and damp out of your home.  As will most any wood burning device or other form of furnace as it is the heat that drives the moisture away.

In your situation the one thing you most certainly don't want to do is to be using an unvented natural gas heater.  The combustion products of such heaters create a considerable amount of water vapor that will be attracted to every nook and cranny in the house that isn't warm.   Where I live, the use of such a heater is useful as Winter air can become too dry and the added moisture is beneficial.