Yvan -
Does the mass heater need to be "nomadic", or just "tiny"? Do you need it to be a true
rocket stove, or is hot, clean combustion sufficient? That is, does portability (either when installed inside a structure, or removed from the structure to allow for separate relocation) matter? The old pocket rocket might fit the bill, if you could heat up a mass with it, though the life span would necessarily be limited.
The
Honey Do Carpenter stove isn't exactly a rocket (but does have a high temperature burn with what appears to be clean combustion - no Testo results posted, however), and is DIY and lightweight.
An overview video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4o2FM_r4Mg
He has other, more detailed construction videos on his channel. He plumbed an earlier version of this stove through a heated bench, so made it a true mass heater; this could be a pebble bed, with the pebbles removable for transport, if necessary. You can buy the stove plans from his Etsy shop (
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1420052527/stove-build-manual-engineered-cad) for about the same price as buying the cook stove plans from Matthew Walker Remine (Walker Stoves). I have no direct
experience. I found Darwin's videos when I was investigating homemade aerated
concrete. Matt Walker's stoves are well tested. I don't know about Darwin's, though he's used them a fair bit.
I intend to build Igor Kuznetsov's OIK-14 in a small shed at our lake property as my first foray into constructing brick
heaters. The shed is nominally portable (built on skids), but I don't intend to move it. Free plans (if somewhat lacking in details) are available here:
http://eng.stove.ru/products/otopitelnyie_pechi_oik/oik_14
Reading Igor's "Advice for people building our stoves" might be helpful, too:
http://eng.stove.ru/stati/v_pomosch_lyudyam_delayuschim_nashi_pechi
Hardware to suit is available from Max and Eva at Firespeaking, from the Bardens at Maine
Wood Heat, and several Chinese and Eastern European foundries, as well as Pisla. Or, you could go the homemade route (whether you build it yourself, or you have a welding and fab shop do so).
A build video (not by Kuznetsov) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DidZNcbNUHo
There's also a video showing how to build a version of this stove with a firebrick lined (so doubled skinned) firebox, which would required fewer red brick and more firebrick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRgllRfazmY
Both of these videos can have auto-translated closed captions provided by YouTube to your preferred language.
The exterior of these stoves can be plastered, if desired.
This small heater requires about 180 Russian sized bricks (closer to the size of firebrick, so slightly larger than standard American sized bricks). I may need to rejigger the bond pattern a bit (maybe size it up to 2-1/2 X 2-1/2 bricks), or I may just build it to the slightly smaller dimensions to match my small American bricks. I need to consider the available hardware options and pricing. It will be a bit too much heating capacity for the space in my shed, either way. The floor size with Russian brick occupies about 460mm X 460mm (about 18 inches square), and is about 1.8 meters (a little less than 6 feet) tall. The height could be adjusted slightly by reducing the number of courses of brick in the upper part of the stove (above the fire box) though this will decrease the heating capacity. This is a small double (stacked) bell style heater, but the upper bell is so small, it's almost a contraflow (vertically channeled flue gas) style.
It is probably possible to modify this stove so that it's built "on the trench" as the Russians say - meaning no grate or
ash drawer. This would be fairly similar to the batch box stove burn chambers, and not too far removed from Peter VanDen Berg's newest development effort, though the OIK-14 has a top exit through a slot for the exhaust gases, whereas Peter's uses a slot in the rear wall of the firebox with a separate riser. Kuznetsov's layout is more horizontally compact (for good or ill).
This stove could be constructed with an external tension frame made of steel angle (bed frames or whatever), and could even have sheet steel skins between the bricks and the tension frame, as was done in the late Soviet era when making small, cheap, lightweight masonry stoves for use on upper floors of apartment buildings. The frame (and possibly skins) would make it more more robust when being moved from place to place inside a moveable tiny house. The sheet steel would help cover any small cracks which might develop during a move (or is it better to see them and re-plaster them?). I would think some ties or bracing to anchor the upper part of the frame to walls or ceiling (even if only installed temporarily during a move) could be useful, too.
These are just a couple of suggestions for compact stoves which I have considered for my small space.
Kevin
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