Mark Roelofs

Im using all the oak bark i have as mulch underneath my fruit trees. With time i will move to living mulch (plants). And i think i will just relocate the bark to other trees if it is not needed anymore. I do not grind it down, the big chuncks will last many years as mulch here.

Both  trees are in the sun almost the entire day. They only miss some morning sunshine

We have 2 mature Tilia trees in front of our house. They were already there when we bought the place 2 years ago. I live in South of Spain, but I live at 1600m altityde on the north side of the mountain. So i do not have the typical mediteranean climate. We have a bit more rain then at lower altitudes and freezing temperatures in winter. Summer are still hot and dry (maybe one day of rain per month).

The trees are doing fine and are healthy, my wife likes to collect the flowers for tea.

It is not about saving livingroom space or money in bricks. It is to heat the kitchen via the wall that is already there. Making a continiuous bell, with a 1cm gap between the bell wall and the kitchen wall will ofcourse also heat the kitchen wall, but to much much lesser extent (i think). In the end the kitchen wall will become warm of course, but will it be enough to really warm the entire kitchen, and maybe even the bed and bath-room..... ?

I also do not want to tear everything down after a few years because it does not work. That is why i'm gathering ideas and opinions of people with experience. If everybody hear says, it will probably not work, I will change my design. I prefer to first make a proper working heater, and then maybe experiment with something later, instead of the other way around

The floor is thick concrete, everything in this house is build pretty massive as you mentioned. So the weigth of the bell will not be a problem

Thanks John. I was checking the bill for the wood and was indeed wrong about the price. €1.86/m for 70x20mm planks. Total what i bought was ~€70. I do have some leftover stuff, but not alot. So per door about €35. Wood prices in the EU at least doubled during Covid, and I guess somebody is making a big profit, because the prices did not go down afterwards...... as they tend to (not) do

Cristobal Cristo wrote: Have you considered to open the dividing wall...

We very much like our kitchen the way it is now, and it already has an old school wood powered cast-iron cookstove with oven.

Regarding the J-tube: I also like the simplicity, and since im completly new to this sort of construcions and design i find the BBR a bit to daunting. I also really like to have hole for the fire, I do not know why, it just looks appealing haha. Maybe because it is so different from a regular fireplace. Yes, my child will be able to burn himself anyway.... maybe a BBR is safer, but if it is really needed I could always make a tight wooden fence around the firebox.
The encroachment in the room of the woodfeed will be less, because now there are a number of whole bricks that take up space and serve no purpose. So I will cut those to size. And I like the small space between the wall and the wood feed to store some firewood.

Fox James wrote:what a great project and it sounds like you are having fun already?

Yes. very excited. Eventhough my brain tells me all the crazy stories about effeciency and comfort should be true, I still want to expierence it to know
The main reason is indeed the simplicity of the J-tube. In the end, children should also learn to not just touch flames. My toddler already is very carefull with the fireplace, and is turned off by the heat.

Yes, I heard about toxic dust from the thermic wools, that is a definite issue.  I have not yet decided on what materials to use. I have to find out what is available here, and also get myself a bit more informed about the options. What type of material I need will also be dependend on the design in some ways.

The brick chimney inside the bell is not my idea. It came from a different thread, and there they mentioned Matt Walker's cookstoves. I'm not sure if it will be a good idea here, for reasons I will discuss below.

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Tying the bell to the excisting wall
So the challenge that Cristoball mentioned earlier. I want to make a L shaped bell-wall, because i want to use 2 excisting walls of the house. 1 wall is the kitchen wall I want to heat up, and the other is an outside wall which I will insulate. I have 2 ideas that might work, see attachment below. One is more simple, the other more robust. Neither really fixes the bell to the wall, but this is not really what I want do due to different thermal expansions of the bell and the wall. The idea is to have a flexible and leak-proof seal.

1. Build up the bell wall and add in a typical seal for stoves/bbqs. This alone will never seal properly because you would have to apply force in the mentioned directions (the arrows). This is what you normally do with a stove/bbq door/lid. Since the bell wall is pretty much rigid, applying a force towards the wall will crack the bell wall in other location. Especially considering that I have to close the bell wall at 2 location, in different directions. To create the leak-proof seal I would use Silicone. High temp Silicone can withstand 180C and 300C peaks. For the outside of the bell this should be enough. For the inside of the bell, the silicone is (hopefully) protected by the seal.

2. Applying the same kind of seal between the bell wall and the excisting wall. Screwing a stainless steel strip into the wall that is made to put pressure on the bell wall. Between the wall and the strip and between the bell wall and the strip there will be a seal. By applying force on the bolts the strip will rotate towards the bell wall and put pressure to seal it (see the picture on the right). This is a lot more complicated and expensive then silicone. and still at the beginning and end of the strip it might be more difficult to get a good seal, and air may still leak.

This type of seal is available everywhere and can go up to high temperatures

For both options the bell wall will be not fixed, so in theory you could pull the wall over and destroy it. Of course the walls will be held in place by the top of the bell which will be attached. And eventhough I was thinking of using clay as mortar for the bell wall (because i like the idea of being able to take the wall down and re-use the stone), I heard that this kind of mortar does not really 'stick' and hold the wall together. So maybe it would be better to use cement anyway, to at least have the walls as a whole structure. Not sure about this, anybody any insight in the structural integrity of a single brick wall with clay mortar?

The stone chimney inside the bell is also related to this challenge, because it will have to be sealed properly against the excisting wall. But option number 1, with silicone, is not possible inside the bell because of too high temperatures. So maybe in the end the chimney will turn back into a metal tube with insulation....

If anybody has any ideas/thoughts/feedback, i'm all ears

Hi all,

Im almost done with my double wooden doors for a new room im working on. I didnt see any 'show us yoyr current project' thread, so i thought i would make a new thread.

I have made 1 door(different design) before these two, so im pretty new at this. All in all they are turning out very nice i must say. They are made with 70x20mm( some needs to be cut back to 60x20) wooden planks, 3 layers of it. And for the bottom middle section i used 20mm thick tung in groove floorboards.

The windows I got for free so for me these doors are very cheap. Maybe €40-50 each for the wood and then some extra for the hardware.

With this design it is very easy to change the measurements of the door, and as long as you  cut the wood at proper length and straight, the door will turn out nice. I used dowels in all the connection (duvel in Dutch on the design drawing) for extra strength (through the thickness of the wood and on the heads and tails of the horizontal planks in thr middle and bottom). For the first door i made the mistake of drilling a 8mm hole in my dowel jig which gave way too much room for drilling croocked and unprecise. So for the next door i made a jig with a very small hole to mark the position and later drill the bigger holes. This worked way better and the planks lined up better.

Welcome to my thread Cristobal

I understand the appeal of the gaint chimney, that is probably the reason the previous owner build it as well. But we really do not like it. We definitly like the style of this house, that is why we bought it. And my wife will be in charge of the aesthetics, she likes a bit more modern stuff, but it will definilty fit nicely into the room. IF i manage to work out the functional design first. So my 3d model that I share here now should not be seen as an aesthetic idea, merely functional. For one thing, the beams with carvings in them, we want to reuse them on the top of the bell as a reminder how it used to be.

By placing the bell more or less where our current stove is, we lose a lot of space. Something that cannot be overcome if we keep the chimney, and not use it as our primary heating source for the room. A bell more in the middle of the livingroom would take up a lot of space in the middle of the room, making it more difficult to partition the room in different functions, like 1 or 2 offices, a relaxing area and a play area for our todler. The previous owner, who restored the house, was an older man, who was mostly here alone. Which shows in the way he designed the house and its rooms, it is just not very pratical, especially if you have children.

Also with your bell location the living room will be heated very nicely, but my kitchen wont be i think. I really want to incorperate the kitchen wall into the bell, because then I could heat the most important rooms of the house with 1 heating system. Also, because our living room has such heigh ceiling, and the kitchen doesnt, i hope to make the kitchen TOO warm, so we can open the door to our bedroom and/or bathroom so we can kill part of our diesel bill. Because besides the fireplace we also have central heating/hot water via a "concenient" and "being dependent on ~half the world" diesel heater.  The previous owner also liked to behave as a wealthy landowner and burn a lot of diesel jaja

Hi Scott,

Thank you for your explanation. Everything is more clear now for me with the temperatures. And good to know that tiling should not be an issue when using some silicone.

@Cristobal: I see you life in the Sierra Nevada mountains as well, as do I. Except in a different country, I guess having snow covered mountains is not as original as people used to think when they were naming mountains haha.
Thank you for raising this concern, I'm also thinking about this challenge and will start drawing up some sketches with ideas. I will share there in my own design thread, because it is not really related anymore to this thread, and very specific for my build. You are very welcome to think along when I put some ideas on paper: https://permies.com/t/367670/tube-Bell-heat-living-room#3738687

I'm also interested in photos! I have plans to build something similar as well , but smaller.