Pascal Dutilleul

thomas rubino wrote:
With a piped mass, I promise you will be grateful if you add a bypass.

I indeed already bought a pipe  of around 4" (in fact it is 125 mm which is a little larger).
Unfortunately they had nothing like a damper at the store.   I guess I have to figure out an easy way to install that bypass as a proof of concept and see if it works.

Fortunately I have a cleanout running to the back of the heater, so I could somehow connect the bypass here.

@Nina We bought  a house in 36160 Lignerolles. So we are practically neighbors  

Hi everybody,

Thanks for all your kind suggestions.

As I  understood it correctly, I have a couple of options:

I need to have patience until the bench is dry like Nina and Nancy suggested.

Additionally adding mass or insulate the barrel seems also a valid option.

Or I could force things a bit, like Thomas suggested, by adding a small bypass.

@Coydon I tried at several outdoor temperatures:  9 °C and 13 °C. In windy and wind still conditions

@Burra They chimney is insulated by  putting the 8" tube inside a 10" tube and adding clay stabilized perlite between.  Only the lower 60cm in the attic is not insulated.  But I've added my leftover pieces ceramic blanket around it. But that didn't helped.

As I currently have a week of vacation it is time to finish the bench. I need to add a couple of centimeters cob on top to level it. And I wanted to be sure the system works with the detour around the pillar.

Because I don't have any ceramic blanket left, I'll add more mass around the barrel. And additionally, I'll take the leftover blanket I used on the lower part of the chimney on the attic.

But even if this doesn't work with the wet bench, I am more or less confident it will work when the bench is dry (I hope )

This is my second time I build a 8" RMH.  The first I build 8 years ago, and is still working as it should.
Now, the new one (in another house in the center of France)  gives me quite a headache.  I know with new installations, it is not easily started until the bench is dry.

So I tried to fire some starter blocks right below the vertical tube (via the cleaning exit on the left of the stove).  Same preheating inside the heater. Draft is very good.  

Then I fire some wood and it starts up normally, the same rocket sound as my previous RMH. But after a couple of minutes, the sound halts, and I get a complete smoke back.  And I can't stop it so I have to put  a wet towel over the fuel feed to stop the burning.
And I suspect it is probably because the exit chimney never gets warmed up.  I have the initial draft  because I preheat that exit chimney but after a while it cools down, before the smoke could have warmed it up.

It is installed in an old house, single glass windows.  

What I've tried :  

taping bubble foil over all windows, just to see if  that draft was the cause. Nope.

Increased the fuel inlet, because it initially was only 36 cm

Added a metal inlet so the wood doesn't block the oxygen intake.  That inlet does not obstructs the burn tunnel. That gives a cleaner burn in the first RMH

Put starter blocks in every one of the cleaning exits. In the hope the chanel in the bench doesn't cools down the exit gasses too fast. The flames get sucked inside to the direction of the exit chimney.

The only solution I can now think of is the bench is too long.  It goes around a pilar, and maybe I shouldn't have done this. I did however used the calculation from Ernie en Erika's book (Start with 50 feet, substract 5 feet per turn).

Does anyone has other suggestions that I can investigate without  having to break up my bench?

Fox James wrote:Lead flashing are normally made up on site from 3mm, flat lead sheet, quite easy to weld lead with a basic torch and fine nozzle.
I bet there are loads of youtube videos …..

But unfortunately all these videos are explaining flashing on rectangular brick chimneys. But mine is a round metal chimney.

So I might be using the wrong search keywords

Welding is not needed because my leadfree sheet is self-adhesive (but not stretchable)

See image. One of the ideas is to cut out half a donut (1) to close the gap between the tube and the tile. And then to stick small (overlapping) strips (2) on the tube and that donut. And of cours same stuff on the back sideof the tube too, with the donut strips to overlap.

But I'm pretty sure this won't be 100% waterproof.

Hi all,

I have a sloped roof with tiles and I have a  sticky lead slab (not actually lead, but a surrogate).

The Chimney for my RMH is installed, and now I need to waterproof it.

The internet only shows installing lead slabs on rectangular brick chimneys.

But  my chimney is a round 250mm tube.

Does anyone has some resources, schematics, video,... on installing flashing with a lead slab around a cylindrical chimney?

Thanks!


Edit: added some photos

Hi Benjamin, this was indeed a difficult question.

But what I meant was how does a rocket stove compares to a barrel type for heating. Specifically for quick radiant heating.

It's ok to have a temperature of 5° Celcius in the morning in winter. Our RMH heats it up to 15° in a reasonable amount of time ( after a couple of hours of burn) And then we keep burning,  to heat the bench.

After reading a bit about these rocket stoves it seems  they will be doing just fine.
Although it looks less permies than having an oil barrel 😂

Didn't now about cook stoves. Thanks for the hint !

I'll definitely investigate this.

A first question that comes to my mind is, will this sufficiently heat the the 28m2 kitchen? As the bench will be in the living room.

Hi, I've been heating my house in the Netherlands with a RMH for about 7 years now. It has an open kitchen, so kitchen and living room are in the same "heating space".

Now we're moving to France. It is an old house with thick 50 cm walls made of rocks.
The large kitchen is next to the living room, however there's also a 50cm wall between them. That's because one of the previous owners built the kitchen against the existing house. And the old backdoor is now the doorway between kitchen and living room.

I want to heat both places with the same RMH.

I was thinking to put the steel drum and inlet in the kitchen. That will heat the kitchen fast, which is nice in the morning for having breakfast.
And maybe create a hole in the wall for the exhaust pipe and put the bench in the living room.

But I'm afraid when it is cold  (0 degrees Celcius) when we have to burn for several hours, that it will be too hot in the kitchen. On my current RMH if have a woodstove fan on top of the barrel, and we can blow the heat either in direction of kitchen space or directing the barrel warmth to the living room.

Does anyone has suggestions, remarks or other solutions?

Thanks in advance