Adding tonnage to a light weight Soap

I purchased a Woodstock Soapstone Co. .. "Fireview Model" about four years ago. It weighs seven hundred pounds with a cast iron frame and Canadian soapstone inserts.

I got quotes on three ton models from Tulikivi, Willach and Canada and choked .. $14-24,000. Before selling my old stove I thought I would experiment by adding an adobe heat sink to the rear and "see" if I'm happy with the results. I would go to a rocket after that .. and may anyway. In Idaho we have igneous .. blow sand with out clay .. great for potatoes .. calcium bound up and unavailable to plants .. but clay deposits nearby that sluff off and fall onto some roadways .. I think I can get that for free.

I would like to move my existing fire place forward about three feet and add 1-2 tons of adobe to catch what I've been missing .. heat up the chimney. I have a 6" flue and I'm thinking not of a barrel but a thin wall steel fab counter flow core to save space .. 4-5 foot high .. perhaps 4x4 w&d. My floors are 5" slab with rebar. My neighbor is a genius and welds and could fab what I want and keep me out of trouble.

On a scale on 1 to 10 .. what do you think of this project?

is your floor strong enough to hold up that weight?
is your insurance adjuster going to be ok with the mods

other than that it sounds like a great idea

If my fire insurance guy is happy with the basic fire place now .. which I am not changing .. and there would be a cooler exit out of the mass .. very low compared to 400 degrees now .. less carbon build up .. I'll burn hotter fires .. less burn time .. half the wood .. I think he and I .. will be whistling Dixie.

As stated .. a five inch concrete floor with rebar set with small squares. We could drive a tank over my floors.

WHAT LENGTH J .. SIX IN AND SIX OUT

I have ordered my book yesterday on the Rocket Mass Fireplace .. but I'm going to look at what material for the short tube to hold the rough wood and some could tree limbs or fence posts, old potato cellar wood .. .. fire brick base and then for the riser with the heat.

We are now talking a different fireplace from the above which would be a free standing fire place with the flu running through one or two tons of cob.

Six in and Six out - I will want the wood tube .. after it is filled with wood, to have the same number of square inches of free draft as the six inch round flu pipe leaving the cob mass. Balance. Not my idea .. expressed elsewhere.

All hot gases running through either fire place above would need to impart the scrubbing action of narrow channels .. not the "up the center" action going on in all six inch round metal flu pipe .. or worse yet .. a three foot round used barrel.

LEARNED WHILE IRRIGATING - in a ditch running water .. when it comes to a culvert .. you can only run half the volume of water into the round metal culvert if you do not put a tapered larger pipe in front to guide the water in?

I'm thinking gases are not too dissimilar.

I will use the "counter flow" design .. a term not talked too much about here but should be adopted as everyone else uses it .. and would need to have a lot of cob mass above the barrel / counter flow .. for the free standing existing fire place cob mass .. but not critical in a "butt warming" extremely long type mass.

Three in the A.M. .. my neighbor cut beans tonight .. he raised a cross between great northern and pinks and cut them dried and with dew on them so they will not bust and scatter beans on the ground .. kept me awake and he went home .. I'll go to bed. See you on the flip flop.

Just a note, I built a heat exchanger for our wood stove a few years ago and had mixed results. It worked great for extracting more heat from the wood we burned. I would guess we got close to double the heat. However, since it was a slow burning wood stove and a large heat exchanger the flue gas was very cool. Twice a winter I had to clean the heat exchanger and I gummed up our flue with creosote badly. My wife thinks that we had a "flue" fire in the heat exchanger once, but not in the chimney or flue. Last year I took it out to be safer, but not as efficient.
kent

Thanks MM .. I was wondering about that and was tinkering in my mind about a thin layer of adobe to leave some heat out the bottom and up the stack.

In a Tulikivi the top reaches 1,000 degrees .. the middle of the counter flow is at 600 .. and at the bottom where two down drafts come together .. only 200 degrees. They burn their fires wide open which we can't do and for that reason I need to sell it and go Rocket it sounds like .. or just get marginal results and I don't want to do that. Thanks.

there are other ways and you dont have to sell your stove. Rick hazard or cedar grove farms used his old wood stove as the firebox/burn tunnel for his RMH.

the adding mass to a wood stove is OK but you still need 90C for the draft to work. and you can very quickly scrub that much heat out of the system causing creosote problems
as said above. however using the hot stack effect and the barrel  system you re-burn the pyrolitic gasses and then scrub as much heat as possible from the exhaust gasses.
you wont need to go up a chimney (however if you want to you only need 90F to get the rise) you can go out a wall like a dryer vent. I think Erica has provided a picture album on her picasa site that has the stove in it. you can reach her site from our page www.ernieanderica.info if you are interested.

Thanks Ernie .. did a little time on the waves also.

Was thinking .. start the stove and when it is hot and the catalitic burner is going at 300 degrees .. switch it into the Mass Heater or would that shock it .. or not draft correctly? There are some Finnish Cast Iron clean outs and draft shut offs one can use also .. but spendy.

I have called around and located some really good clay 30 miles away. I can make side boards for my 24' Goose Neck and go get about four tons. I can shovel out my waste water ditches and get all the good sand I need. Received my RMH book by Evans and Jackson and I'm reading it.

I cant tell you how the catalytic things gonna work, however i dont think it will shock the system much. I assume the catalytic jobbie is electric so i hope the stove works if its not plugged in

I think for this year I'm going to have to get a box wielded up and put rocks in it with a top for a clean out and for a cooking surface if I need it.

It would be 38" or counter top height and two foot by four looking down on it from the top. I think the rock weight would be about a ton and would take my numbers of fires from five a day down to three.

I would take the existing flue pipe and add a Tee above and below .. shoot the hot air in after the fire reaches 300 degrees .. shut a damper above and send the heat down into the bottom and up and out the top of the cooking range. Still in the designing stage.

I could add a J Rocket to it next year. I will need more heat in it with more pressure.