Help me narrow down heat/cooking/H2O options

Hello there,

There's so much fantastic information on this site - I'm fairly new here and completely addicted! Thank you!

I'm looking for some advice about heating & cooking with wood. I live in Vermont on 18 acres (lots of wood) in a 2-story, 1000 sq ft barn that loses quite a bit of heat,  and currently have an older Palladian Soapstone Wood Stove (plus a Rinnai). It's a great little wood stove but even if totally loaded, doesn't make it all the way through a cold winter night.

I feel it's important to be ready to be off grid - at least with heat - with everything that's going on in the world. I understand that the Rocket is likely my best bet, but I can't find anyone nearby to help me build one.

To that end, I'm pondering the following two options:
1. adding mass and cooking abilities to my existing wood stove
2. purchasing a wood cook-stove

For #2, I'm thinking it makes sense to get one that can also heat water (reduce the electricity bill and have hot water if SHTF/grid goes down). A couple of (supposedly) good options for that are:

A. Tim Sistem North Hydro Wood Fired Oven with Boiler (linklink)
B. ABC Concept 2 Hydro Wood Fired Oven with Boiler Link

Any recommendations, thoughts or advice very much appreciated!

Cheers,
Lou

This video might give you some inspiration. We have the same cookstove but without the water heating option.

Hi Michael - thank you for sharing this video, and igniting more excitement about getting one of these since I tap a few trees here.

Which brand of woodstove do you have there? Sorry if I missed it. And it sounds like it puts out enough heat for you in chilly Zone 1b!

Many thanks!
Lou

Lou White wrote:Hi Michael - thank you for sharing this video, and igniting more excitement about getting one of these since I tap a few trees here.

Which brand of woodstove do you have there? Sorry if I missed it. And it sounds like it puts out enough heat for you in chilly Zone 1b!

Many thanks!
Lou

Our stove is an old (40-ish years) Waterford Stanley. We bought it used (and abused) 7 years ago and have had no troubles with it. It is allegedly 700 lbs, so it holds a lot of heat, which is ideal for us in our yurt. I think the btu rating is around 33,000 per hour, which is not high compared to a mid-sized airtight woodstove, but the mass is what makes it work for us. We only have 380 square feet to heat, but as you mentioned, we're in a cold climate, living essentially in a tent. We've never been cozier though.  

Hi Lou

I have decided to purchase a liberator 2 rocket Stove. It is a rocket stove and I think you can  retrofit mass to it.

Easy to cook on top of it. I am looking forward to all kinds of exploratory adventures. It’s possible a simple reflector oven might sit on the top.  Also an option is to use the top as a stovetop with making stew or soup or whatever. I have just been looking at the idea of putting a thing on top to capture heat to transfer elsewhere. I can’t make a cob bench before winter and want to spend some time with my stove first, but then I think I will be building a mass bench and attaching it to the liberator 2.

I went with this option because I still live within the zone of inspected houses, mortgage, insurance requirements, and all that. The liberator two has an EPA rating and so it’s completely legal in my situation. I would love to hand build a stove but that brings its own challenges.

There’s a thread in this forum I will reference below… an open system heat transfer by water system I think is interesting, and I might mess around with this winter.

It might be worth your time to check the liberator 2 out!

Thank you so much, Thekla! I did a brief tour of the Liberator - I'm intrigued for sure. One potential sticking point for me, if I am understanding correctly, is that if using wood it has to be refueled "anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half " but on pellets much longer. I'll be using wood because it's free.... please correct me if I'm misunderstanding.

We don't have many codes here where I live, at least at the moment.

Thanks again - I appreciate the input!

I don’t have any experience yet, stove won’t be here for a week…

With mass added, that shouldn’t be necessary.  I am hoping that the radiant heat will heat the walls and furniture , which will hold the heat.

I haven’t posted the link to the other thread yet, sorry, but there are lots of ideas posted along the lines of adding mass to conventional wood stove… from stacking stainless steel pots of water around on and beside stoves.

It’s dusk here now and I need to get the animals in.  

I will give it a try later, but if you’re curious, go through the forums listings and look at all the threads about heating and maybe you will find something useful!

Be back in a while

Here’s an interesting thread about adding mass to existing wood stoves

https://permies.com/t/72030/Affordable-add-mass-existing-woodstove

And here’s a link to a really great idea…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BREQY1TL7JA

Someone else posted this, saying “imagine this on top of a rocket stove!”….

I’ve been trying to figure out how I could use the pot of sand and copper tubing this winter!

Lou White wrote:Thank you so much, Thekla! I did a brief tour of the Liberator - I'm intrigued for sure. One potential sticking point for me, if I am understanding correctly, is that if using wood it has to be refueled "anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half " but on pellets much longer. I'll be using wood because it's free.... please correct me if I'm misunderstanding.

We don't have many codes here where I live, at least at the moment.

Thanks again - I appreciate the input!

Getting back to the frequency of stoking question… and again I have zero experience, but that’s not what I am expecting….  Maybe feed it that often while you want a continuous burn, but never in my wildest dreams was I planning to keep the fire burning all the time.  But who knows?  It’s a combination of heat loss balancing heat supplied, and what a person is satisfied with, and comfortable with.  I don’t like the house too warm!  Plenty of variables to determine how long I burn, and how often I stoke the fire.😊

I’ve committed myself and what comes next is discovery.  Wish me luck for the coming winter!  I do have some mass where the stove will be installed, and have lots of stainless steel vessels to store some heat overnight.  Won’t be much fun if I have the flu though!

I hope I will be able to build a mass bench (under the windows to decrease the convective cooling) for next winter.  With a mass, the question of how often and how long to burn goes away.

Another thought:  our expectations of what we get from burning wood for heat are entirely shaped by contemporary wood stoves.  We might be pleasantly surprised!

I have had very good luck finding someone willing to talk with me at length about the liberator 2, and answer my questions.  I called the number on the website and a person answered the phone.  He was quite knowledgeable about the stove, and he was speaking from the warehouse there in Missouri.  If you are considering the liberator 2, why not talk to them?

Good luck!  Have fun!

Great information, Thekla, thank you! I have a bit of room behind and at the side of my wood stove so will experiment with adding mass. There's some concrete blocks laying around outside and definitely some rock. My wood stove is soap stone with a catalytic converter, so never actually gets very hot.

Perhaps I should just experiment with what I've got this year instead of forking out for something new.

Some of the wood I have to burn is a wee bit wet so I can also stack that around the fire - not sure how close is too close.

I don't have to worry about overheating my home - the opposite is true due to insulation issues that are far too expensive to fix.

So much to learn. And still the garden harvesting and processing is waiting for me!