bobby newnan

nathan luedtke wrote:I'm going to make a guess on what St. Paul would say in this case:

"You probably don't need to make an incinerator in the situation you described. Put it all into a series of hugelkultur beds. If you go down the path of building an incinerator, you'll be spending all your time carting wood around and cutting it up and tending to the incinerator. Time you could spend harvesting delicious food from your hugelkulturs."

If you disagree, please describe a little more about why you need to burn this wood instead of building hugelkultur. You said "My goal is just a clean burn of lots of organic material." Maybe an alternate goal could be "My goal is to clean up all this yard waste, trimmings, and wood." and then find a way to accomplish that goal that gets you other benefits and less work.

Of course, some men just want to watch the world burn.

That's actually a terrific idea. We were going to plant a garden this year - not a bad idea to kill two birds with one stone.

Is the lack of response because I am over thinking this?

What I am using it for:
I am not concerned about efficiency at all. In fact, quite the opposite - I need this to burn hot and fast so that I can deal with lots of tree branches that need to be disposed of. I live in an area that doesn't allow the burning of green wood due to smoke is illegal and outdoor burning in general is frowned upon by neighbors unless it is an occasional fire pit. I have seen online that the rocket stove burns hot enough that little or no smoke is produced - this makes the rocket design very intriguing for my needs.

So what I want to do is build a decent sized rocket "incinerator" perhaps out of cinder blocks to get rid of my yard waste and make an enjoyable project out of it as well.

I am planning on making a "L" shaped design. I'll call the bottom of the L the "combustion chamber" and the vertical part the "chimney." What I haven't been able to determine from my research is the ratio (in length) of the combustion chamber to the chimney for maximum temperatures / burn performance. I am assuming that a longer combustion chamber would aid in gassification leading to a hotter / cleaner burn. But I haven't seen anything to corroborate this. Some videos of rocket stoves have the wood resting in the combustion chamber but part that is on fire is constantly fed where the combustion chamber and chimney meet. Then other videos like paulwheaton post show a horizontal flame that is in the combustion chamber that snakes into the chimney & a cob oven (combustion chamber) with a chimey which has a flame after-burning out of it.

Is the combustion chamber secondary in importance to a well heated chimney? It is my impression that the hot chimney is more important.

or, for my purposes I am over thinking this? My goal is just a clean burn of lots of organic material.

Also, once everything is heated up will it burn everything including green wood cleanly? 99% of my wood is dry, but there are always a few branches of green wood that have just fallen.

Thanks in advance!