Bethany Dutch : If there is a
Rocket Mass Heater R.M.H., in your future you have come to the right place, with over 19,000 members you can come here and ask a
question and someone will help you find out how to solve your immediate problem !
If at anytime in my explanation what I am saying no longer is something you can follow or stops making sense to you- refer to Larry Ng 's
answer ! However-
basically the Stovetec stove is NOT capable of sustained use as a cooker, When sold for that purpose in Third World Countries after about 5 hrs of operation daily-
cooking for extended ,multi generational families, which the good people at Aprovecho some how forgot about - the Stove lasted mostly around 1/2 to 1 year
before the
cast iron top or the base failed !
One of the Original creators of the Stovetec has made a major improvement, the SilverFire
Rocket Stove, While this is a major improvement on the Stovetec, it too
fails short of your needs !
In a more perfect, kinder world it might be possible to make a combustion/fume hood with an air gap directly above ether of these two stoves, allowing you to bring
them indoors where you could easily monitor these stoves and channel extra heat into a thermal mass for a little heat storage, but, you still would not have created
the conditions for the flow of hot exhaust gases to flow sideways for 20 or 30 ft thru a thermal mass ! Also the size of ether stoves combustion area would require you
to split every piece of
wood fuel that you fed it down to the size of a fat to a very fat pencil to achieve near the efficiency of a
Rocket Mass Heater, in which case I
would expect the Stovetec, or the Silverfire to last a few months when exposed to the temperatures that is common with any merely good
Rocket Mass Heater !
The amount of time that you would spend, crouched over ether of these two models until they failed, with or without a fume hood over the top to carry your exhaust
gases away and past a thermal mass and then out of your house would cause you to pray for the day that your '
Rocket Stove ' finally failed due to metal fatigue !
However, you are way ahead of most other people in that you have already grasped the simple science of the operating characteristics of a Rocket Stove and can more
easily move forward to have a '
Rocket Mass Heater' R.M.H., in your future !
May I suggest that you go to
rocketstoves.com to download a PDF Copy $15.
oo of
Rocket Mass Heaters , with over 100,000 R.M.H. created around
the world, most of them were made by people reading out of 'The Book', and nearly all of the 1st time builds (that worked) were made by people following the outline in
' the Book', there is
STILL no other book that contains as much Rocket Mass Heater family information in any language ! (and I don't make a dime ! )
For the Permies Crafts! Think like Fire, Flow like a gas, as always, your comments and questions are solicited and welcome, PYRO - Logically BIG AL !
) we're a little short on cash. I was planning on looking for a woodstove but I was just thinking, we have this Stovetec we'd bought for emergency cooking, would it be possible to convert it to a rocket mass heater?
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