rocket mass via erica's plans

eight inch. works great. we are more than happy and encourage anyone considering building to go ahead. we use way less wood and are much more comfy.

That looks great Michael. Congratulations. Is it fully supported on the floor boards or did you build a sub structure??
Eric

yes. we had to beef up the floor joists in our stand up basement. used steel "floor jacks". easier part of the whole job.

You use way less wood, meaning you used to heat with a woodstove? That is the best kind of comparison, pretty near apples to apples, for gauging effectiveness and efficiency. Glad it's working well!

yes glenn. we had a fairly large socalled airtight very highly rated efficiency wood stove sitting where our rocket mass is now sitting. i have never done a detailed study of wood comparison use. but being 70 years of age i wanted to process much less wood than with the regular wood stove we had. it was rated for at least 1000 feet of space. but it never kept us really comfy unless we were shoving large amounts of larger pieces of wood almost constantly. so we studied the rocket mass for a year or more and finally built what you see. i can say that we use less than half as much wood, maybe much less than that even. we do have to split it smaller. we use a cheap electric splitter and sometimes the screw type splitter for really big logs that i bolt onto the truck. a really great plus of the rocket is out comfort level is just great now. it heats up our small farm house (750ft) very quickly. barrel top goes to 900-1000degrees F very quickly (15-30minutes). and the temp of pipe at ceiling is 100 to 150. the bench-couch temp 90-150 depending how close to stove itself. a dream place to sit. the build was hard for me and judy helped some. we bought a cement mixer and sold it when done. However, it was more than worth the work and money. in case you haven't guessed we love the stove in every way. it functions perfectly w/o the problems i've read that some have with the rocket mass. we followed erica's plans as closely as we could. anyhow, if you burn wood for heat i say build this stove. it is in a different universe than our englander wood stove.