I will attempt to heat my home all winter with just cardboard and garbage

For this to make sense, I need to point out that several years ago I heated my 3-bedroom montana home with 0.60 cords of wood for an entire winter.  I have experience with regular wood stoves.  I think it would have been 6 cords with a regular wood stove.  

The funny thing is that when I did that test, I didn't have curtains (which save heat).  And we all had poor habits about holding in heat.  And we had poor habits involving being too warm.  So I thought we would get better at all these things and try again.  I feel like there are a lot more things I would still like to try, but this winter I got a new idea ...


Years ago ...  during the age of junk mail arriving in our physical mailboxes ...  I heard of a guy with a rocket mass heater that heated his home all winter with only junk mail.   Today we have about 5% of the junk mail we used to have, but we have a lot more cardboard boxes.  And I suspect that we have a lot more paper/cardboard packaging too.

Over the summer we saved up our burnable garbage.  Let's see how long it lasts.

I have learned that if you try to burn just cardboard and paper, about five minutes into the burn, the wood feed is full of an ashy ember that is slowly burning.  But if you can toss a few twigs in there, it will keep the air flow so strong that it will quickly clear out that ashy ember stuff.  So I have a few crates that I have accumulated "garbage" from the ground last summer.  Whatever I found laying around on the ground outside.  Pretty dry stuff made dryer by sitting inside.  Twigs, bark, broken branches, plant stalks ...   stuff that i would normally use as a mulch or compost.



We've had a couple dozen fires this fall and we have not yet touched our cordwood.  Just "garbage".  

I gotta say that I prefer burning cordwood.   Currently, we are burning about 80% to 85% cardboard.  You fill the wood feed and keep filling the wood feed for about two minutes.  Come back in five minutes and it is ready for more.  In a way, it is faster, but it definitely takes more time.  Cordwood has more fuel per effort, so it takes less time.  

Burning garbage has its merits.  Things feel less like waste.  There is less to take to the recycling drop off.  Less garbage.  And where the recycling peeps don't want any garbage that has grease on it, we actually prefer to burn garbage that does have grease on it!




This is yet another experiment.  We are still feeling it out a bit.  Stuff to be learned.

Do you have a standard size of cardboard you are using as feedstock or just an assortment of sizes?

I wonder if the extra effort to cut the cardboard into uniform strips might be useful to reduce the amount of stuck ashy embers if you didn't have a bundle of twigs handy in similar supply to the cardboard.

All kinds of wacky stuff.  Including some stuff that would otherwise go to the landfill.  

I think we see similar ashy embers when burning bark.  So this is not a property limited to cardboard.

We cut up cardboard to use as "kindling" for our regular wood stove. I'll spend a bit of time while listening to the news, or some talking head, so I'm stacking functions of my time.

"Twigs, bark, broken branches, plant stalks ...   stuff that i would normally use as a mulch or compost." That stuff is just too valuable mixed with our chicken/duck/goose shit to burn it!

In some areas, paper is the one item that actually, genuinely gets recycled and reused. Where you live matters. As an experiment, this is wonderful, but my recollection is that the last person who tried it, was in a city and stealth heating, and not where scrap wood was easy to get? Proving this works, would be wonderful for those people who are in that situation.

Good luck - looking forward to reading about your experiences.

Is this a piped mass or a stratification chamber? Because you are almost certainly going to have to clean out all that ash during the heating season and if it's piped there's a risk of blockage. This is why I prefer to burn hardwood in my 4" J-tube in the greenhouse...cleaning the run through the cob bench is a bitch.

I know that a few years ago we burned a huge amount of paper and ended up needing an extra cleanout mid-winter.  We noticed that the draw became kinda weak.  The draw is still quite strong.

This reminds me that I have to call the chimney sweep. Which made me think, how do they sweep these rocket mass heaters that seem to have a labirynth of a chimney?

Flora Eerschay wrote:This reminds me that I have to call the chimney sweep. Which made me think, how do they sweep these rocket mass heaters that seem to have a labirynth of a chimney?

No creosote.  No need for the chimney sweep.

Would compressing the paper using a manual baler increase the mass and burn time?

John F Dean wrote:Would compressing the paper using a manual baler increase the mass and burn time?

Dunno.

At the moment, I am thinking that the purpose of this is to compliment "a guy heated his house all winter with junk mail."   I like that I am doing something similar.  We could end up with "heated the house all winter with cardboard and garbage."   I feel like if I introduce some sort of processing contraption, then dumbfucks will come to the errant conclusion that it cannot be done without the contraption.  I think that because of decades of demonstrating how excellent something is only to later find out that dumbfucks appear to have a louder voice saying something utterly wrong.   So I choose to minimize dumbfuck bait.

Unfortunately, you make sense. Much of my life has been spent hearing what “John said …”

yes we have lots of "clever trevors" --(thanks Ian Dury ) who keep coming out with hand lever press to hydraulic powered devises to make briquettes from shredded wet paper , dry them out and burn in your stove ---but its the stuff of urban legend almost----complete waste of time----the only processing routine i follow with cardboard or newsprint ---is to make rough parcels of twigs --wrapped up ---and placed into the burn chamber---no glossy paper---its full of chalk---makes abundant ash

R

Flora Eerschay wrote:This reminds me that I have to call the chimney sweep. Which made me think, how do they sweep these rocket mass heaters that seem to have a labirynth of a chimney?

My recommendation for the best chimney sweep ever, though I know Paul won't need him...

my vid from 8 years ago - heating a 3 bedroom montana home with 0.60 cords of wood for the winter

Timothy Norton wrote:Do you have a standard size of cardboard you are using as feedstock or just an assortment of sizes?

I wonder if the extra effort to cut the cardboard into uniform strips might be useful to reduce the amount of stuck ashy embers if you didn't have a bundle of twigs handy in similar supply to the cardboard.

We do that too.but sometimes it makes creosote.