Bob Segraves-Collis

On YouTube [I know the disdain in which much on there is held, so don't beat me with it!] there is a chap, Van Powell that makes a great deal of noise about how Rocket stoves are dead [from a technology relevance perspective] because water stores more heat than cob. 1st off what he is referring to is a RMH not and Rocket stove. 2nd he seems to think that everyone wants to figure out how to build a water jacket RMH that won't explode. I am waiting to her the bang from his nieghborhood.

Let me touch again on the certification issue. Peter D., you posted some very useful comments regarding certification of other stove types and referred to a document you had that provided a great deal of detail on methodology. Could you make that available to Ernie and Co. to serve as a model for certifying a RMH. {I would like to see the face on the reviewers when the read PM emissions < .1g/kg.... That would be entertaining!} Given the standard measures you mentioned, an RMH would blow other stove types out of the water. I believe there was already mention that there was a case where fire fighters measured the characteristics of an RMH exhaust, those same folks and their handy instruments might be brought to bear again to provide a baseline estimate for the lab to work from.

As for the ability of an RMH to generate heat, the measurement could be vastly simplified by changing out the Cob for a water jacket, well inslulated. [if only as a test model] Raising a given volume of water one degree is standard in both scientific and industry practice. Start off with water at a given temperature and volume, run the stove, measure the change in temperature and convert it to BTUs. Also, by measuring the surface area of the heat riser and measuing the skin temperature at several places we could get a fair representation of the radiated heat from it. That would leave only the heat lost out the exhaust. Again temperature of air in compared to temperature of air out and volume of air in will yield the values needed to calculate that. To give the measured performance some relevance we might agree on a "standard model RMH" that could be replicated by all manufacturers. [We do have an industry association, right?] We could compare the performance to the amount of potential in the wood burned for a relative performance figure. Compared to other heat appliances I feel certain the RMH would stand well above the rest.

Alan, I did in fact look at the other threads and yes thermal convection, whole house fans, and lots of the technologies can help cool a house. But when those don't work in hot muggy summer climates, as has been discussed in various threads, other solutions arguably are needed. That is why the Lied Lodge use of heat to create cooling was of interest. I guess my thinking was back to the land enough??? I was hoping others might have explore the concept and could discuss it. I guess I will try going from scratch.

A rocket stove is a heat appliance. We burn a fuel, it creates a heated exhaust, we use the exhaust to heat a thermal mass and sometime to heat water, cook with, and generally amaze the uninformed [of which I am becoming less so, slowly]. My reading so far tells me that the stove is a heat pump in that it pumps the heated gasses out the exhaust(?). For an ordinary wood fireplace or wood stove to draw there needs to be a temperature differential at the end of the flue such that the exhaust gasses are drawn out of the fire chamber and don't escape into the heated space. Is that true with a rocket, and if so is there a temperature that is optimal at the exhaust for a rocket stove to function properly? The reason I ask is that I want to harvest as much energy as I can from my rocket stove but don't what to design a system that is not going to function efficiently.

Here is part of my thought process - As a culture we have created a huge array of machines that use heat to do different tasks. Some of those machines use very high heat [a forge] while others use much lower heat [a hot water heater or a sterling engine]. In a rocket stove we generate heat in the numbers of hundreds of degrees. The exhaust cools as it passes along the exhaust path. Can we place heat collection appliances [heat exchangers] along that exhaust path to harvest heat at different stages in the exhaust cycle and use them to drive the heat consuming machines without destroying the efficiency of the Rocket Stove?

Almost two years ago I saw a post on the Midwest Permaculture site that intrigued me. It was a short discussion by Bill Wilson about how Lied Lodge & Conference Center uses the principles of absorption heating to cool the entire facility located in Nebraska. [http://midwestpermaculture.com/2012/02/burning-wood-to-cool-an-entire-lodge/#more-6575] Obviously the scope of operations for a facility such as the Lodge is way larger that most of us will ever need but the concept stuck in my mind. Why can we use the rocket stoves we build to cool our houses, greenhouses, etc. using a scaled down version of the technology that is used at Lied Lodge? Has anyone tried it? Are there other example we could draw on?

Andrew,

For the most part, if you allow the compost to dry out completely the worms will die a slow death. Some few egg sacks my remain, but they will be slow to repopulate.

Thank you for the link. I have been fascinated by the Earthship concept and tried to find information on their systems for sometime. The link you posted is just what I was looking for.

The Outdoor Botanical Cell concept is a good one, but in many parts of the country getting it past the zoning board would be an uphill battle. I was doing some reading on additions to an aquaponics system that would yield food sources for the fish and found comments that some folks had been using "Biopods" to process human waste. Does anyone have any experience with that process? I was thinking that if one could us Black Soldier Fly Larvae to render the humanure to a compostable product that would then fed to worms in worm beds. By the time those processes had run their course the product should be fairly benign???