Joost Meijers

okay, after thinking some more about it I thought that the temperature of the fire would indeed be to low.
So I'm thinking about lining the lower quarter of the barrel with thermal mass on the inside, this way I would get a high temperature at the fire and still conduct the heat to the water.
another idea I had was to put a stainless steel/copper coil on the inside of the barrel (starting low and going up) I hope I'll use more of the energy of the fire this way.
Let me know what you guys think

I added some pictures, the first one is the alternative heat stove, there will be a chimney on top but for some reason I couldn't get it done with the drawing program...
The second one is a drawing of the complete hot tub with a traditional pocket rocket as heat source.
My father actually thought that this wouldn't be very efficient since the temperature inside the barrel would never be high enough to efficiently burn the wood.
What do you guys think?

hi everyone,

I'm building a very low budget hot tub. So I decided I wanted to heat with a wood stove.

When I started looking on the internet I quickly found the concept of a rocket stove and after reading the book and looking around on this forum I tried to come up with a plan for a completely submersible rocket stove.
Then I read some more and realized I was completely out of my league I've never even built a traditional rocket mass heater so I discarded the plan.

Then I came across the Snorkel hot tubs this seemed like a very good design but now the problem was cost, this thing is made out of cast aluminum so way over budget.

In the end I thought of the pocket rocket (as described in Rocket mass heaters by Ianto Evans) this seems to be a fairly efficient wood stove and it can be built for almost no money.
It is going to be quite a large hot tub so I was thinking about using a 55 gallon oil drum as the burn chamber, a 10" x 35" feedtube and a 6" x 80" flue exit

I only have 3 questions left:
1: Do the dimensions look about right to you?
2: Will a pocket rocket work at all when submerged? (the feedtube and flue exit will be above water level of course)
3: Will it still work when I make the exhaust come out of the side and make an extra "loop" around the oil drum underwater? (I will upload a drawing later today)

I realize I'm very new to this subject (in fact I started reading about it 2 days ago) so I hope i'm at least a little bit on the right track.

thanks in advance