Rocket stove gas lighting

  Has anyone created a gaslamp from rocket stove effluent?(Not RMH, just the rocket without the mass)  I'm thinking that a large lantern glass mounted just above the heat riser of a rocket cook stove style heater could provide some light. Propane lights use cloth filaments but this type of lamp would probably destroy the filament in short order. Perhaps a ceramic catalytic converter or some other ceramic could make a durable filament.

    I watched a vain attempt at this on YouTube when I searched "Wood gas lantern" but there was no filament, and no insulated riser, just a dull orange flame coming off some wood pellets, covered with a soon to be ruined lantern glass.

    If anyone has been successful with this or if you know of a link please let me know. Otherwise I'll start collecting the necessary components and do my own experiment.

    I could see something like this working as the central lighting of a small cottage. A j-tube followed by 3 feet of insulated riser, followed by 2 feet of lantern glass, followed by a stovepipe which leads to the chimney. Don't let the kids touch it!! Something like this would throw a lot of heat and not be suitable for summer useage.

    Any ideas on what might work for a filament other than ceramic and tungsten?

dale hodgins wrote:
  Has anyone created a gaslamp from rocket stove effluent?(Not RMH, just the rocket without the mass)

Yes. I just can't find it just now. L shaped rocket stove with a shorter than normal riser (3in. dia. I think) and a tube of hardware cloth (steel I would think) to extend it. It was one of those just for tonight kinds of things I think... hang on, there it is:

http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/stovesdoc/Still/lantern/lantern.html

I think it can be done better and have some ideas for a combined small space heater lamp with a glass shield and proper exhaust... I'm thinking sized for a boat cabin.

     Yes that's a crude version of what I have in mind. I see he doesn't have any sort of filament and the flame exhausts into the room rather than up a stovepipe. With gas lights the glow of the filament produces more light than the actual flame does and the lantern glass helps to retain heat against this filament. It appears in this photo that what we're looking at is simply the glow of a flame.

   By having the flame within a riser and venting 1500° gases over some sort of filament we should be able to get much more useful light. Notice that the guys  face isn't very well lit even though he's right by the flame.

dale hodgins wrote:
     Yes that's a crude version of what I have in mind. I see he doesn't have any sort of filament and the flame exhausts into the room rather than up a stovepipe. With gas lights the glow of the filament produces more light than the actual flame does and the lantern glass helps to retain heat against this filament. It appears in this photo that what we're looking at is simply the glow of a flame.

   By having the flame within a riser and venting 1500° gases over some sort of filament we should be able to get much more useful light. Notice that the guys  face isn't very well lit even though he's right by the flame.

As he says, just enough more to see and deal with scorpions. A gas lamp uses ashes? I think. something that can take the heat. It's not very strong whatever it is. The minimum riser diam. for a RMH is 6in. but the stoves are much smaller.... 3 is quite common. I think for a lamp may be even smaller (1.5 to 2 in.) though there are limits because there is no pressure to push the gasses through. It relies on chimney effect and surface resistance can slow things down at small sizes.

It may be that by the time the riser is big enough to work, too much light is generated or too much fuel is used for the amount of light.

I've recently done an experiment using small chips of firebrick and heating them with flame from my propane Tiger torch. On its own the torch produces very little light but instead makes a clean blue flame. Once the golf ball sized chips are up to temperature, they glow and produce considerably more light than what is thrown from the actual flame. So I now have proof of concept. It seems that a glowing filament is the answer. Light produced during combustion is minor by comparison.

Now I need to figure a way of suspending some of these chips above the flame. Probably a basket made of fire clay or tungsten. I suppose brick waste could be stacked in a manner which doesn't require it to be suspended in space. I'll screw around until I either burn my fingers or conquer this problem. I'll try to stack things as loosely as possible so that I get good air flow and so that all surfaces have an opportunity to send their light to the room rather than to the side of another chunk of brick.

My finished product is likely to have more thermal mass than I had initially envisioned. This is not meant to be a RMH but simply a light rocket stove where the effluent gas is used for lighting purposes but the heat is not stored. There will be some warm-up time but something of this nature could be used as the primary heating and lighting source of an RV. After the fire burns out and is no longer producing light, the damper could be closed and we would have a few pounds of nice hot firebrick which would provide a dim nightlight until they cool. I'll try to have some video when I post on this in the future. I only learned how to upload pictures this week.