Eric Hammond

You don’t need the little wire shelf for putting the wood on, you just slide a piece of pipe in the corner that runs from the front to the back

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