Coydon Wallham

This makes me think of a design feature I don't recall encountering discussion of yet- with a stratification chamber, what are the benefits/trade-offs (if any) of the exhaust pipe plunging down into the bell like a straw vs. the pipe exiting the side of the bell down low and running up alongside of it?

Barrel kissing is to help with cold plugs. Part of the creativity around the exhaust could be some sort of bulge to collect the hottest gas with some sort of gate to create a bypass there. [edit: on reflection, there are likely more elegant solutions to a bypass over there.]

The opening post states that the feed would be at floor level, and there's no reason not to have the top of the strat chamber at the same level. There would just be a radiant chamber sticking up into the room. Working with a japanese style, I think feeding this would not be inordinately awkward.

Is this for a mild climate? Otherwise I'd be thinking 8".

Can't tell the room layout, would the barrel/feed being  at the other end of the bench leave it more centered in the living space and leave you free to be creative around chimney?

Hmm, is there a theory behind putting the brush pile on the stump?

When i was there for bootcamp we burned a lot of bark. I heard a later assessment that this was creating too much ash/not producing enough BTUs. Is bark part of the experiment/rethink here, or does it remain a separate category?

Is it possible that Li Ziqi mentioned Permies.com on some form of China's social media...?

Les Frijo wrote:I don't understand this.

Is my math right?

154 parts per million = 154000 parts per billion.

Where is the 600 servings number coming from?

I somehow missed this the first time. Yes, the comparison would actually dial up the number for concentrations, meaning each serving of rice would deliver 600 times the FDA recommended limit. I suspect Asian restaurants in the USA would have run out of customers by now if this were the case, hence my quick assessment that a disparity would be best explained in the other direction.

Looking at an FDA paper on the subject, arsenic in brown rice is actually listed as 154ppb, not ppm. I guess that would mean they recommend children get no more than a serving of brown rice every other day (or one serving max of white rice daily). This sounds in line with general social perceptions, although obviously this is just a crude guideline individuals should refine if they are concerned.

The FDA paper goes on to estimate observed chronic problems determined to result from real world arsenic exposure. They found lung or bladder cancer attributed to arsenic in rice in 39 people per million. The overall cancer risk was 90,000 per million, meaning rice was associated with ~0.04% of cancer cases, or four one hundreths of a percent of lung/bladder cancer cases attributed to arsenic in rice.

Going by the numbers in that paper, concerns over cancer prevention would be most productively focused in other areas. Apparently, arsenic is so omnipresent in our current environment, attempting to live 'gick-free' from it would not work.

Looking at the paper's introduction and conclusion, it seems likely to have been written to promote certain patterns or products for pediatric diets. I've seen ample evidence that the FDA readily departs from an objective assessment to pursue outside agendas, so I'd be interested to hear if other sources contradict what they say here. I have some confidence the numbers are roughly objective despite my concern with the conclusions stated.

Also, the paper mentions that washing/rinsing/soaking rice will reduce arsenic content somewhat, while also reducing some nutrients accompanying it. They refer to these minerals as "enriched", so I'm guessing that only applies to artificially "fortified" nutrients...?

John F Dean wrote:I suspected as much.  I referred earlier to the cranberries cause cancer scare on the late 1950s.   The news medias was all over it, cranberry farmers went bust … then someone actually read the research and crunched the numbers .   One would have to eat truck loads of cranberries ….

Similar story with rootbeer and sassafras, where rats force fed more than their body weight of the compound in the 60s were found to suffer liver problems. If you drink more than a 100+lbs of rootbeer a day, be sure it is safrole free, assuming you have a metabolism resembling that of a mouse/rat.