Ant Post 005
Life in Ant Village.... there's more going on here than meets the eye...this a very small
compost pile from an organic source -free (sort of...transportation costs not included)!
...a ground squirrel is getting fat on those little pieces which didn't get compost tea put on them.....very fat -don't think the rubber boa snake can get its mouth around him yet.
...and here's Ben's cooking stove which I will rebuild. Why? Notice the flames jetting out around the pan? Before I put the pan on, the flame is only 2/3rd's up the vertical part of the L, after the pan is over the opening, the flame jets upward -BUT IS STILL BLACK WITH SOOT. This means the pan tries to form the J of a true
rocket stove but fails to burn cleanly. The first 90 in the J is equal to the entire L, the second 90 in the J is superior to the pan over the opening because the J tube doesn't leak around a pan, it has to burn around a solid 90. The L stove burns more
wood than a rocket cook stove with a J instead of the L....Here are the things I'll do when I rebuild it:
-I'll raise the whole cook stove J tube so the top of the J tube is at
solar plexus height;
-this will mean the
feed tube will be at about crotch height ( I won't have to crouch to feed the fire);
-I'll reduce the aperture down to five to six inches, this will reduce the amount of wood the current stove will use in addition to burning less wood than the L tube because it is a J tube which burns more efficiently.
My mid-day potato won't be burnt either like the L tube's mid-day potato is right now....I can close up both the top and the bottom of a J tube and the heat in the J tube alone will cook a potato where as the L tube looses too much heat because the vertical part of the L is so much larger than the short part of the L where the potato currently has to be cooked....more heat is lost up the very high L and the potato is much closer to incoming very cool air. For this reason, I have no choice but to put the potato in while there is still a little flame left on the wood ....even then a larger potato will not cook all the way through in the L tube like it would in a
rocket stove J tube.