Inherited a 2400sq ft house in Northern California. We ripped out the forced air heat, replaced the floor with radiant tubes in earth, and were using an outside
rocket stove with copper coils in a 55 gallon drum to heat a 300 gallon box of water that then would heat the floors.
Hard to go outside when raining and run the stove, so we decided to retrofit the woodstove. The pictures tell the story.
Originally tried to use the woodstove as is, but the airflow baffle was damaged and we would get a lot of smoke when lighting the unit. Then, I just piled a bunch of fire brick in the burn chamber (Knowing nothing about rocket stove design, since my husband spearheaded the
project) trying to create a smaller burn chamber like our J unit had. This worked for a year, but required filling it every 15 minutes and hours of burning. I finally removed the top fire bricks from the chamber (they kept falling on me anyway) and this was fabulous this last burning season. I could fit in larger pieces of
wood and more wood per batch. It also seemed like I burned much less wood this year.
The other highlight that made burning easier this year was my husband installed a temperature switch to turn off the water pump when the fire went out. Without the water running through the coils they would burn up, so I used to have to wait to go to bed or out of the house for the fire to burn down.
Thinking about making an earth retreat cabin with a batch rocket stove and am wondering how different they are from this design. (minus the water coils of
course)
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