Hello thar. I've been looking into stove designs to replace my existing (broken) wood stove. While I've been all over youtube looking for different designs I certainly don't yet know enough to tackle this, and I was directed here for potential feedback. Here is my situation:
We have an existing wood stove and fire-bricked corner of the living room, with a metal chimney straight up and out the roof. The wood stove is basically toast - I'm unclear on what kind of door it had, but it's gone, and given the old wood shake roof I'm somewhat amazed the house is still standing after decades of using the thing for heat.
What I'm looking for is something I can put together on the relatively cheap side (ideally for about what the old stove can sell for at most), and which will not throw sparks far enough to escape the other end.
From what I gather, an ideal rocket mass heater will not leave hot enough exhaust for a traditional straight-up chimney to work, so I'm hoping it's possible to find a balance where a decent amount of heat is retained in the house and no live sparks are escaping, while still keeping the exhaust warm enough to rise out and not smoke the house out. Punching a hole in the wall isn't on the table, unfortunately. On the plus side, we have sufficient wood left over from before the death of the old stove to handle this winter easily, even with a less than perfectly efficient stove.
I'm imagining something not unlike this illustration: (lifted from
http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp)
With the rightmost end terminating in a 90 degree bend feeding up into the chimney. I could conceivably build the whole thing in a box of some kind, with the metal stove structure bedded in dirt for later teardown and removal. This is all spitballing, of course, so any input would be appreciated.
