Rocket mass stove in a yurt

Has anyone ever done this/seen it done?  We love rocket mass stoves, and would like to put one in the 20 ft pacific yurt we are about to buy from a friend.  This yurt is going to be our home while we build up the rest of our homestead (we bought 40 vacant acres last fall), so we need to keep things temporary/portable. 

Our ideas right now are along the lines of benches filled with sand to run the exhaust pipe through.......

etomaro wrote:
Has anyone ever done this/seen it done?  We love rocket mass stoves, and would like to put one in the 20 ft pacific yurt we are about to buy from a friend.  This yurt is going to be our home while we build up the rest of our homestead (we bought 40 vacant acres last fall), so we need to keep things temporary/portable. 

Our ideas right now are along the lines of benches filled with sand to run the exhaust pipe through.......

There is one with pictures in the alternate energy forum. However it may be more permanent than you wish as they made a permanent floor for theirs. There is also a thread about building a portable RMH. Either one may help. Also check out the pocket rocket (which is non-mass, but quick and easy).

From what I have heard sand tends to be more of an insulator than you want.

Plus, although you guys want things to be temporary/portable....
You said yourself that you will be living in it while you build your homestead. That could take six months to four years! You need to be able to be comfortable and not risking danger from some thrown together thing.

And keep in mind, anything you build, you can take apart! Although cement is pretty hard to tear down I don't think Cob would be so hard to pull down, but then again I have never worked with it before.

And, yes why sand? Is it available in large quantities on your property?

Hey look! Paul has a post that would TOTALLY work for you!



He says it seems to be portable and you could just move it to the Homestead when done

Great video, thanks JohnnyBe!

Yes, we're planning on living out of this yurt for 5 years, give or take.  I have never worked with cob either, and I definitely don't want to do concrete. 

The bench in the video is almost exactly what I have had in my head.  I will document the work that we do, and post the results on here.

If you live in a place where it's going to get cold, you might consider an efficient wood stove.  You may need some real heat output,  depending on the insulation and thermal mas of your yurt, neither of which amount to much in a typical yurt. 

a Rocket Mass Heater is a VERY efficient wood stove!

Efficient, yes, how about the heat output?  I don't know, I've never seen one in action.  I do know yurts need a quick, high output heat source. 

It will get plenty cold, we are in Wisconsin. 

The way I understand it, we can still get the high heat output from the barrel that's covering the combustion chamber, and then the thermal mass will be absorbing all the heat that would go out the chimney in a traditional woodstove setup.

The yurt will be insulated, but not nearly as well as a cabin/house/wofati could be, so I am expecting we will need to have more frequent burns.

I just watched the vidio.  I'm not convnced.  Looks like you would spend most of your time splitting wood and stuffing twigs into a hole.  I use two stoves at my cabin, one barrel stove that can heat the place up pronto, and another that is very efficient and brick lined stove to provide long-lasting heat without the wood consumption.  This efficient stove has alot of mass but not nearly enough heat output to warm up a frozen cabin.  Those barrel stoves are great if you have access to plenty of firewood. 

We had a pretty similar setup in the cabin we lived in for the past 4 years, one cookstove, and another woodstove that was simply surrounded by stone.  We found that we had to keep a fire burning all day in the coldest months to keep the cabin warm (it was not a well-insulated dwelling).  I am hoping to drastically reduce the amount of wood that I burn in a winter by drastically reducing the amount of heat I send out the chimney.

I am pretty committed at this point to building one of these myself (looks like a fun project!).  If anyone has any ideas besides sand in benches, I would love to hear them.

Thanks again everyone!