Hello. My name is Marius, and after discovering the concept of a
Rocket Stove Mass Heater and all you wonderful people here, i was determined to try to make such a stove in my
workshop (because it's wintertime and i have no means of warming up the place, so i can't really work as much as i want to). Before anything, please read all of my post, because i will try to give you as many information about my system as possible. I started up gathering all that i would need, and got cracking. I even bought Ianto Evans & Leslie Jackson's book "
Rocket mass heaters: Superefficient
wood stoves YOU can build". So far so good, right? I built a mockup heater outside, following the advice of many people here, and after i lit the fire, i was glad i was doing this outside
I'm glad to report that all was working well, the draft was good, the wood was burning ferociously, nu smoke coming up the wood
feed no matter what kind of wood i burned or how the wood was positioned. I followed the ratio of the tubing, and all is as it
should be (concerning all the pipe lengths and diameters). BUT! the smoke doesn't seem to burn as it exits the heat riser! There is a
video on richsoil.com, where someone burns the paint off a barrel, and then puts a simple pipe inside the burning barrel, and the gases REALLY burn like a rocket! Is this how the gases are supposed to burn inside the
rocket stove mass heater as well? These are my dimensions: The heat riser is a 6" metal pipe, 35" tall. It has a 10" metal pipe on the outside, and in between it has as an insulator, compacted pulverized refractory bricks with a little bit of clay, just to act as a bonding agent (i had a lot of refractory bricks that weren't good anymore, they would break fairly easily). The thickness of the insulator is roughly 2", equally distributed between the pipes. The burn tunnel is 3 bricks width long, roughly 14", and the inner dimensions are 4"x 4", the wood feed being also 4"x 4"x 7" tall. I've tried making the burn tunnel longer, then shorter, like 1 brick or 4 bricks width ( 4", respectively 18"), and nothing changed, by this i mean that the fire would still burn very well and with no smoke coming back through the wood feed no matter what, but no smoke would burn through the heat riser! There was a lot of smoke... The heat riser makes that rockety sound to some degree, but to no use. I have tried making the heat riser longer,up to 39", but still no improvement. I should note that all these tests were done without the barrel on top of the heat riser. These being said, there are a few questions that i want to ask: First, the heat riser insulation. I've read that in order to burn efficiently, the heat riser must get very hot and stay that way. That's the role of the insulation. But my heat riser gets hot, on the outside, kind of slow. To get so hot that i can not touch it at the bottom, it takes as much as an hour of good stoking and fire burning. To get equally hot in the upper half, it takes as much as 2 hours. Could the insulation cause this? Could this slow heating be the cause of not burning the gases? I remind you that all this was tried without the barrel on top (by the way, i have a 55 gallon steel barrel). The smoke wouldn't burn even after 3 hours of wood burning. Second, the 6" pipe was manually made by me, because i wanted a pipe that was made out of fairly thick metal, the ones that i can buy are really thin and i thought that the metal would burn if it was that thin, especially in the heat riser. So i made the pipe out of sheet metal, and it came out pretty round i should say, and i bolted it with 3 bolts to keep it's form. Now, my question is, could the 3 bolt heads that are on the inside of the pipe influence the burning of the smoke? I don't know what else to do. Does the barrel influence in any way the burning of the gases? I don't know. And i won't be able to test it with the barrel until the day after tomorrow. So, please, help a little fellow that wants to build an efficient stove
I want so hard for it to work at it's maximum capacity, because if it works in my workshop, then i can start building one in my house, and stop wasting so much wood with my current crappy wood burning stove (it's my sole heating source and it does a really crappy job)... Thank you and sorry for this extremely long post