Bob Frenock

I burn about 3 cords a year.  I also have never heard the term "face" cord .  It would be really nice to build a rocket mass heater for our house since our sole means of heat is firewood and I pretty much do all of the cutting, splitting, stacking, carrying up to the house every couple days, etc.  However, we have a typical wood frame house set on a concrete foundation and with a crawl space several feet high under the first floor.  I would have to crawl under there and reinforce the floor in order to bear the weight of a RMH.  In my seventh decade now, and although I'm sure I'm still up for that much labor (crawling under the house AND building the stove), it is the sort of project I tend to try to forget. It was an eagerly anticipated project many years ago, but life gets in the way. Looking more and more unlikely .  And surprisingly, even with global warming, I seem to be needing to keep fires burning for more months out of the year than I used to do.  That seems odd.  Maybe I can find and entice some young campers to stay out here in the forest for a month and help me build one.  That would be interesting!

Seems anything I want to grow, the voles (possibly gophers too) want to eat.  Out of a couple thousand tea plants, I have maybe a couple hundred left, with the rest having their roots eaten off to within an inch or so of the surface.  And that was only because I quit weeding and let blackberries, etc. take over the tea plots.  That did slow down the destruction.  But trapping would only grab an occasional rodent, and all of the underground traps only caught moles which don't eat the roots.  I won't do chemicals.  The cats have caught a few, but are essentially useless for a large area.  Raptors are around, but again, the few they grab make little difference.  After many years I've given up on planting anything in the ground.  Felt pots work ... for a while, then one chews through and eats whatever is inside.  Tens of thousands of dollars wasted.  I do have a couple truck loads of rock, with the idea that I would trench about three feet deep around my plots and fill them with rock.  But, afterwards, I decided against it.  Just a little shift in the dirt, a little too much rain, an errant root, and a tiny hole develops and they swarm in ... after I've raised the plants for four or five years!  Just not worth it.  And there are documented reviews of them making dens up to six feet deep.  They have taken control of my land, and they own it.  I can only put in a few meager beds within my 30 acres surrounded by hardware cloth and hope my few hundred, or with lots of luck my few thousand square feet will suffice.  I gave up.

Cécile Stelzer Johnson:  Live PNW, Oregon Coastal Range.  Not familiar with Manchineel tree .  I am familiar with poison oak and sumac and tend to get a reaction quite easily.  But I wouldn't consider them trees, or consider trying to capture their sap.  I was just wondering if there were any studies of the most common trees in the US that might indicate what trees would NOT be suitable for tapping.  Or, who would one contact to actually test some sap for safety?

Is all tree sap edible, more or less, and so not a great danger of poisoning?  Seems like all of the sap I've seen and tried has been mostly water, and contains sugar ... or at least can be boiled down to taste sweet.  For instance, I've tapped and boild Red Alder sap and it tastes great!!!  But how do I find out if there are any less-than-desirable things within the sap?

How about this:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/legion-solar-7-home-ev-rv-camper-power-system#/

I would have already built one a) if I thought these were past the point of experimental and b) if I thought that I wouldn't have to rebuild the burn tube every few years.  Getting too old for that and I seldom see any info about longevity compared to conventional wood stoves (which I use). And yes, I would really like to cut down on the three-plus cords of wood I cut and burn every year as my sole source of heat .

I am a prime canidate for a RMH.  I've burned wood as my sole source of heat for over twenty years.  I want a RMH ... but after reading dozens and dozens of articles and watching video clips, etc., it seems way too artsy-craftsy for me to attempt.  Seems every heater is an experiment.  Or the last one had this problem or that problem so we are doing this or that.  I read your short write-up about the types of tubes.  Every one had a fault.  Or couldn't be found, or costs a fortune, etc.  Makes me tired just thinking about it.  Don't get me wrong, I do a lot of building.  I single-handedly put a foundation under a 1905 house and turned it into a two-story duplex.  I built an aquaponics system.  I built a two-story pole barn.  I just finished an outdoor ADA-compliant shower.  But the million variations, and multiple failure points of a RMH have kept me from the attempt.  I don't read much about them any more, and probably will never build one.  I watched the short video you made for your kickstarter when you first advertised it and didn't find it encouraging.  Sorry .