Jeff Rychwa : Your wood looks O.K. remember that this is not a use one match fire, See if you can find some old pallets that have been setting undercover and split them
down fine ! They make excellent kindling and Squaw wood !
For a 1st build I see lots of progress and good ideas, From your pictures you did a Great Job on insulating the Heat Riser/Internal Chimney ! It also looks like you built directly
on top of the concrete floor without using any insulation except bricks between the combustion chamber and the floor, this will work, and certainly drives heat into your floor
so that you have some Thermal Mass, but it also retards that magic point where your combustion chamber finally gets to glowing red hot and the next chunk of wood you put
in there seems to spontaneously burst into flames! From that point on you can increase the size of your wood chunks, so that the number of chunks of wood you are burning
drops to 3-5 chunks of straight dry wood !
Instead of getting up a 1/2 hour early to start a fire and bringing it to that magical temperature before you turn it over to your wife to tend to while you go play in the woods
It may take you as long as 1.5 hours to get it to the point that you can turn it over to your other adult supervision ! (please make sure you leave her with a nice big stack of
dry wood, we want her to like this thing !)
Be grateful for the nice high ceilings, I see it is new construction, you do want to keep your landlord happy if he will let a family of Seven move in ! I do feel that there must
be some glaring short cuts committed, especially in sealing the second floor from the attic space ! Definitely fix the up high leaks 1st !
I have one thing that may be a Big Help, assuming that you do not have a gas fired clothes dryer, get one of those water filled buckets that attaches to the end of your dryer
discharge hose and cleans the exhaust air and traps moisture with the lint ! This will stop the drier from trying to pull in its operating air from outside. As someone has to do
several wash loads every day, you will be greatly reducing your puff back with every load. And cap and seal the dryer vent hole! You only need to vent the dryer outside when
its hot and you are not running your R.M.H. ! If you are really lucky you have or can have a signally device on your washer or dryer signal when it is time to check the clothes,
this will allow for a quick check on your R.M.H.. You will quickly learn to set the timer to match the load of clothes with your Rocket. This should help! For the good of the Craft !
Think like fire, flow like a gas, Don't be the Marshmallow ! As always your comments and questions are solicited and Welcome ! PYRO - Magically Big AL !