Eric Hammond

I would get more serious about foraging and hunting for sure, I have tons of black walnuts, tons of squirrels and rabbits. My garden would expand for sure, but the bulk of my calories is walking around eating grass( sheep) and I have a pig I am currently raising. More things will get fried in lard for calories. I think I have the infrastructure in place already that I think I could double down on production with a little motivation and I would also get more serious about teaching gardening to others and share food and resources and develop my local neighborhood into a community where we can pool resources.  Honestly the more I think about it, there could be a lot of positive outcomes for a 10x food increase. The beginning would suck for sure, don’t get me wrong.

Saana Jalimauchi wrote:

Eric Hammond wrote:My days are nothing like that.  You have to burn a fire pretty much all day to warm the mass up and then you can get by with no fire at night, but you’ll need to burn all day again the next day.  With the temps getting here in the singe digits down to the negatives I expect to have to stay up extra late burning wood to keep the house warm

Oh, Eric, I have seen your thread about the build! Your rocket mass heater is beautiful!
What kind of temperatures are you trying to keep in the house?

I have also read about the cold that has arrived to USA, it was with us here in Finland about a week ago and wow.. It was cold! Our Masonry heater was used a lot, multible hours in the morning and in the evening. The temperatures in the house in the mornings were around 16C/60F.

Yesterday we got the house to around 76. The bench before bed was really hot 🥵 109-116 F. I measure 130 under a pillow. I think we stopped burning around 10 pm.  This morning it was about 63 by the bench and 60 at the other end of the room.

We lit a fire a little before 9 am and the house is now 66 2 hours later, the bench is about 82 F after burning 2 hours.  We will have a fire all day again today.  My house was built/designed for a rocket mass heater and has great insulation. I studied for years before I built mine.

I think our low last night was around 12 F, tonight is our coldest night, supposed to be -4

I love my rocket mass heater, but a lot of the claims around it seem pretty unrealistic to me.  I have no doubt that Paul’s are super awesome because he’s built tons of them, trialed and errored and has them down to a science.

Most people are just going to build one. So I wouldn’t expect the absolute best results.  I used one for my sole heat one winter and burned 1.3 cords of wood.  My buddy at work used a wood stove all winter and burned 1.5 cords

My days are nothing like that.  You have to burn a fire pretty much all day to warm the mass up and then you can get by with no fire at night, but you’ll need to burn all day again the next day.  With the temps getting here in the singe digits down to the negatives I expect to have to stay up extra late burning wood to keep the house warm

Roberto pokachinni wrote:

Eric Hammond wrote:I used my rocket mass heater solely one year, sw Missouri zone 6b. Heating started in October and ended in may. Well insulated house, built for a rocketmass heater. Used 1.2 to 1.3 cords that winter

I guess since you built the home with the RMH in mind, then you don't have any amount of cordwood burned in a conventional woodstove to compare?

What is the square footage of your home?  

You’re correct, I have no baseline to compare it to.

The footprint of the downstairs is 40x20, so roughly 800 square feet. Directly above the RMH is a big opening to the 2nd floor that I would say is 12x12 with a ceiling fan above it to help distribute warm air. The opening leads to a hallway on the second floor with all the bedrooms and then the stairs are on the opposite end of the house so basically cold air can fall down the stairs and get pulled back up at the other end where the RMH is. It actually seems to work really well. I’d say the upstairs is probably closer to 500 sq feet when I subtract the openings and I have a big unheated storage area on the upstairs, so roughly a house sized at 1300 sq ft heated walkable usable space.

The one thing I didn’t understand about heating with wood was I had in my mind that you burnt wood on snowy days.  I never really thought you would need a fire on a 60 degree day, but if your house is cold and you want it warmer, you gotta burn a fire to bring the temp up, so what I thought going in was 3 maybe 4 months of usage turned out to actually be 7 to 8

I used my rocket mass heater solely one year, sw Missouri zone 6b. Heating started in October and ended in may. Well insulated house, built for a rocketmass heater. Used 1.2 to 1.3 cords that winter

I’m just now getting close to finishing 5 years later 🤣🤣🤣🤣 I really think I will finish in the next two weeks. I just finished the lime plaster. I will seal it soon!

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:I came across a thoughtful piece, reaching far beyond Chattypants, that I think is worth reading:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/artificial-intelligence-jobs-careers-training-panle-the-national-1.6978515

I had a favorite book from when I was a teenager and I have never been able to find a writer quite like that one book.  I started using AI to create short stories similar to that book and it spits them out in seconds and it’s better than anything I’ve read it years.

I can seek how it will replace jobs easily.  Plots of movies etc can be spit out quickly

Flora Eerschay wrote:Also, AI hallucination is a thing...

To be fair, that article references getting Chatgpt to summarize an article that didn’t exist based on a fake url.

I know hundreds of humans that make up and assume things based on reading the title of an article, never reading the article and spouting it as fact 🤣


I also wonder since ai learns, if your inputting fictitious things and manipulating content to get the faults you would like to expose, are you teaching your ai experience that’s ok and to do that more, where as if you use the ai for valid thought processes if you wouldn’t get a better product in the end

Sebastian Köln wrote:It is good at all the things we are not proud of as humans...
- making stuff up (including citations)
- pretending to be someone else
- sounding very confident about it
- it steals text without attribution
- never gets to the point
- long answers that don't say much

I don't like it. Marketing loves it but they don't get the blame if it doesn't work as expected.

3 of these things can easily be taught out of it. If you don’t like long winded answers that don’t get to the point, you can teach it not to direct answers to you like that. It learns based on what you tell it.

Content creation and your top 3 complaints are only a small fraction of what it can do, it’s like having a leatherman with 21 tools and you hate it because the can opener isn’t perfect.

For crunching hard data and organizing it saves tremendous time.


All rules of the internet still apply. Not everything on the internet is real.