Cj Anderson

Antigone Gordon wrote:

Peter Sedgwick wrote:Japanese pier and beam foundation with mortise and tenon construction

TRADITIONAL MASS-STOVES IN JAPAN

Your great timber framed house is perfect for a traditional Japanese mass stove floor plan. Surely you can design your rocket stove to fit the architecture, considering how these timber-house types were usually heated originally. I've written small introductions to links below.

* Examples of both the L-shaped and tatami-room heated floors are included in chapter-1 of the series "History of Radiant Heating and Cooling"

http://www.healthyheating.com/History_of_Radiant_Heating_and_Cooling/History_of_Radiant_Heating_and_Cooling_Part_1.pdf

* In a Japanese farm house, the burn chamber would typically be in one room, and the heated mass in the next room. The lower pounded-earth floored room would have the burn chamber and a high ceiling. This would usually be the farm-room kitchen and barn entrance room.  The stove's heated earthen mass would be under the floor of the raised room that had low ceilings for keeping heat in. The wall between the burn chamber and the mass would be made from a plastered wall or movable screens which could be adjusted for the season and privacy. This way occasional smoke would not enter the main sitting room so much.


https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:Kamado-M1685.jpg


https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F2d%2F7a%2Fa4%2F2d7aa4e66277c4369bde5af306116f0e--small-japanese-kitchen-japan-architecture.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

* Even the stand-alone kamado in the middle of a kitchen usually had some invisible chimney buried in the earth.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Kamado4816.jpg


http://www.filtsai.com/japan/2002/18-JulyB/29-indigo-23.jpg


https://i.pinimg.com/736x/03/df/29/03df2929190b8dcc3b037a6418db9de3--japanese-interior-japanese-homes.jpg

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F736x%2Fd7%2F5c%2Fbd%2Fd75cbd7c719f85ecd5453c88257f5176.jpg&f=1&nofb=1


https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F79%2F02%2Fbb%2F7902bb2dcb9a8d7e229c483a310205c9--japanese-kitchen-japanese-house.jpg&f=1&nofb=1


* The raised-room floor might also have a sand-filled depression in the middle for keeping a pot warm with small charcoal. Architecture drawings often show this sand pit in line with the kamado in the next room. So likely that may have been directly over the buried kamado chimney.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irori#/media/File:Kabuto_Kazari_-01.jpg

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F236x%2F8a%2Ff5%2F20%2F8af520cfe8b6eb03a3d4dd6302633465--household-items-diorama.jpg&f=1&nofb=1


https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-on1PreCEUr8/U2VkEU-j2zI/AAAAAAAAO08/t4qpJjWonfg/s1600/P1020533.JPG


https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W9tG1NRwTVo/U2VkiNlit2I/AAAAAAAAO2E/_Oaf51r2kRc/s1600/P1020608.jpg


https://tokyobling.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/irori-the-japanese-hearth/


* The heated table "kotatsu" evolved from those irori sand-filled floor pits.

https://nekohakase.tumblr.com/post/68208953171/kotatsu

Keep us posted Peter.

key terms: "traditional Japanese stove", irori, kamado, ondol

Hi everyone,

Just for reference I need to correct an assumption you appear to have made concerning chimneys in traditional Japanese farmhouses.

I actually lived in an old thatched roof Japanese farmhouse and I can assure you that I never saw a traditional Japanese farmhouse with a chimney- the smoke just rose up into the high open thatched roof and found its natural way out. This accomplished two purposes it kept the underside of the thatch dry and coated the underside of the thatch with smoke and eliminated/ reduced the number of pests that might take up residence in the thatch.

Jeff

Hey Peter,

Don't know if you are checking this thread much these days. I too live in Japan, but at the other extreme in Kyushu. I stumbled across your build thread and read it from start to finish with great interest as it has answered a lot of my questions about materials and construction that are specific to Japan.

I've purchased an old house in Kitakyushu for $7,000 U.S. and am in the process of remodeling it ( raising door frames as I'm 6'3" and consolidating numerous small rooms into one larger room. I also want to put in a RMH but I'm really leaning towards either Peter's double shoebox or the smaller walker cookstove but I'd like to vent it under the floor.  Where did you source your ceramic insulation board- I have yet to find a source that will sell it to me.


I'm in Kyushu and I built a house using rice hulls as wall insulation. The construction was a box within a box or a house within a house. The walls are about 30 centimeters deep. Rice hulls insulate well and are basically free as you discovered, but there are four significant concerns with this type of construction: 1 you will get infestations of tiny tiny insects for the first 4 years- after that they will have consumed anything edible still remaining on the rice hulls. It is claimed borax will eliminate this problem but I was unable to locate borax here cheaply enough so went without it- the bugs were a PITA!  2 rice hulls take forever to settle if you are pouring/ blowing them into a wall space- so either pour them as you build the wall and the subsequent hammering on of the upper sheathing will help the hulls settle. 3 they will escape any tiny hole in the interior or exterior sheathing- that means you should probably use conduit for all your electical runs and you need to be extra careful when sealing wall/floor joints. 4 Modifying walls is very difficult- if you cut open a wall all the rice hulls will spill out (you have this same problem in your double wall chimney design).

Thanks for all your posts,

Jeff