Mike Gilgan

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since Nov 07, 2020
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Recent posts by Mike Gilgan

I am a big fan of making retail outlets responsible for garbage that leaves their establishment. Packaging is a massive issue and is in almost all cases wholly unnecessary. Consumeable products are consumed. Packaging is garbage. We live on our sailboat and are made to feel guilty for bringing our garbage ashore. I have no problem taking it to the dumpster behind the grocery store where we spent $600 on provisions. Almost all of it came from them in the form of unnecessary marketing packaging.
3 years ago
Pig's Landing! I love it! We live in a sailboat with our two little darlings and, as is tradition with boats we necessarily find our selves naming them.
Golden Goose II is the name of our 30' ship. Her predecessor was Golden Goose... a minivan that I built a campertop on and that housed our wee family for 5 months in 2018. The van was gold-ish in colour and had had proposed names of Tickety Boo and... Abomination.  The fable of the Golden Goose is dear to me as it is a metaphor for the beautiful simple life we lead... being cautious to not kill the Golden Goose to get more gold faster. Great thread! Thanks!
4 years ago
Thanks for this input. The bricks and steel backing were something I have been visualizing. The frame suggestion solves how to hold it in place. I'll have a look at the links. Thank you!

Eliot Mason wrote:Mike:

For posterity and internet search engines I'm going to say that an RMH in a boat could work... it would be awesome to build some mass below one of the berths or the settee.  But in your case ... this is tough.  

Consider this 4" core : http://www.dragonheaters.com/4-dragon-burner-rocket-heater-core/  This ALMOST fits your space (just a little long ... maybe if it were mounted higher up?).  This style of construction makes sense in your situation, but this is of course just one of the components.  To burn cleanly and provide a radiant surface you need a "bell" - often a repurposed steel drum.  This core recommends a 30 gallon drum ... which is roughly 20" in diameter and 28" tall.  For your mounting spot I don't see how to integrate a 20" barrel ... but maybe the barrel could be cut in half, stacked and a back welded on ... making a semi-circular tunnel, 10" in radius and up to 28" tall.  

HMM ... the geometry of the pieces is important.  Not sure if it matters, and I'd have to dig around to find the answer, but that semi-barrel might be too tall for the riser.  Maybe a kind and more knowledgeable person will read this and chime in.

Anyway... hat would give you a nice radiating surface - but no mass. Generally the mass is charged by running the exhaust through it (largely a conductive process), but I don't see how to easily add a mass in this case - best option might be just radiating off a boat load (hah!) of heat and trying to get everything warm that way.  Alternately, a panel of just plain firebrick between the bulkhead and the half-drum would provide some mass.  Hmmm... a thin sheet of metal with air gap mounted on the builkhead, a frame holding bricks against that, and then the barrel.  Could work...

Uncle Mud has a "Cottage Rocket " (https://permies.com/t/150536/Uncle-Mud-CottageRocket-Paper) design that packs all of the normal features of an RMH into a single 55 gallon drum, sacrificing both mass and radiative surface for compactness.  I think the exhaust is probably hotter than in a classic heavy-bench system (but it might not be hotter than what your current stove puts out).  Anyway, the point is that his design is for small spaces so I think there is something to learn from his work for this application.

BUT - and this is a big one - while everything above is a "might work - let's see" there is no way this will work if you stay with the 3" exhaust.  You'll get smoke in the cabin, temperatures will be too low, you might get creosote in the exhaust (and risk a chimney fire).  So if you can't/won't enlarge that through-deck fitting, consider if there is a window you could modify.

And maybe if I say his name out loud three times we'll get Ernie Wisener involved ... he may be the one person in the world who can tell us how to do a rocket on a boat!

4 years ago
Thank you all for the amazing thoughts. Is there such thing as a micro rocket? Is there a way to do it without the mass or with minimal mass for more realtime heat?

The space available is very small. 9"W×(12"-18"H)×12"L
I would like to put something where the existing propane bulkhead heater currently resides. (see photo in my original post). There is an existing 3" pipe. Ideally I'd like to keep 3" so if want to reinstall the propane heater when we sell the boat I can.

1) yes, 3" vent is too small.  RMH world generally holds that a 4" diameter system is the minimum size.
2) I briefly looked for but didn't find a capacity number for the C30.  Its not considered a heeay boat, probably a medium displacement design.  A heavy displacement boat just wouldn't care about an extra 1000 lbs of mass, but you might want to consider what that much mass would do, and what you could shift to maintain balance.
3) To get academic, you either need a highly insulated and sealed space, or a constant source of heat.  A rocket heater can pack into a mass which then slowly releases that heat as your constant source.  Given the limits of boats, moisture, etc. you're not going to insulate and seal your way to warmth.  So the rocket & mass can be a substitute for a classic boat heater.  An apt comparison is the TeePee at Wheaton Labs (Montana) which works well in the winter with a large bench as mass.
4) Small space, filled with stuff.  That stuff is mass.  If you can heat that interior mass with radiant heat from a stove you may not need a classic bench mass.
5) yeah, I worry about flexing.  I'd not want to count on a brick design and slip ... either a cast core or a fibreboard design to reduce joints.
6) I really wish there was a way to use water as a mass - after all, you've got plenty!  I've tried to imagine a tank that could be filled with seawater when you want the mass... heat it up, yay.  Want to sail somewhere and lighten the boat? pump that water out.  But getting the intense heat of a rocket into water is tricky, and adding salt to the equation doesn't improve it the design.
7) fuel storage.  liquid fuel is sure easy to store, transport and has tremendous energy density.  A 30' boat has very limited storage for wood.  Granted, a rocket can be tremendously efficient but you still need something like one to two cubic feet of wood per day (other readers may have better numbers there...).
8) driftwood - seems like it could be an ideal find BUT I'd like to know what hot aerosolized salt will do to ceramics since its probably like acid on metals.
9) done well, the rocket is extremely clean and will not stink up the anchorage as much.

There are a lot of variables in play here so its hard to give a definitive answer.  If you can process some of what we're throwing at you and help us reduce the problem a little ... like how much space you can devote to the heater itself, how much storage you can give, how much weight you can add and then we can probably provide more direction.
4 years ago
Hi everyone!

I have a fellow mariner that suggested a rocket stove for heating our Catalina 30' liveaboard sailboat. He is hardcore into optimal energies and I know he is heating his family well this winter. Their 45' boat is toasty like a sauna (his words)  as winter arrives. The challenge is... he is very tight with details on how I might do it. He wants us to cross the Salish Sea to come for a visit but we don't really want to go to Vancouver during the pandemic. We'd rather hang out in tranquil bays.
We use a propane bulkhead heater as a maintenance heater and a kerosene floor heater to warm things up quickly in the mornings but it's annoying to source fuels while cruising, and expensive.
My thought is to put in a wood heater where the bulkhead propane heater is. It's a small space.
I'm very new to the idea of rocket stoves and to heating mass for lingering radiant heat. We are in small communities with hardware stores and are quite proficient scavengers.

Any ideas and wisdom on something that I could build that could tap into the existing 3" pipe in the space where the bulkhead heater currently sits would be greatly appreciated by me and my wee family as winter fast approaches in the Pacific Northwest.
4 years ago