Chris Holcombe

thomas rubino wrote:A  much better build Chris!
I suspect that your stove was not warmed up enough.
The riser needs to be the hottest portion to maintain a solid draft.
The flames will always take the easy way out if they can.

EDIT) after looking at your photos I would make your riser a couple of bricks taller.

Yeah… I started with a little fire and then got excited and put a ton of sticks in lol. I reread the startup section in Weisners Rocket mass heater book and it says to go slowly and make sure the chimney is hot because the J tube is like a kitchen sink bend and wants to plug up with cold air.

OK I’ll see if I can get this closer to the ideal 1:2:4 ratio. Once I’ve got this running properly I’m curious how putting a pot on top of the exit chimney to boil water for canning won’t mess it up and cause it to start back drafting again.

Ok I’ve rebuilt it as a mini J tube with some mud to seal the air gaps in the bricks. It seems to mostly work well except if I load it up with too many sticks and then it reverses direction and I’m not sure why.
I can upload a short video to YouTube if that helps

Haha! Thanks Thomas. Indeed, the baby dragon has bitten me. Alright sounds good. I’ll reconfigure it and seal it up. I guess I need to make another trip to the neighbors house to clean more bricks. He got a whole pile of them when the local school burned down. I had a lot of fun doing this

I recovered some bricks from the neighbor by chopping off the mortar and stacked them into a little stove just to test out. He even had some old fire bricks! I wanted to play around a little just to see how this all works. So far so good. I put about 15 quarts of water into a pot and did about a 30-40 min burn and the water was warm but not hot. I’m curious if taking this apart and rebuilding it with a J tube will produce something that’s much more efficient. Does extending the flame path really help the efficiency that much? I think just for safety reasons doing a J tube would be better. Much less opportunity for embers to fly out.

Chestnut season is here in the northwest! I think my two trees finally have enough to do something with this year. I'm thinking of using a french recipe to make a Chestnut Cream and I was wondering if that is safe to water bath can. I think since chestnuts aren't an acidic food ( I haven't measured ) that the answer is no but I thought I'd ask the community.  I think I can freeze that cream so that's fine as well. For the rest of the chestnuts I was thinking of drying them and then later grinding them into flour.

Glad to see your oven is still doing well! I just read the permaculture rocket oven book and I was a bit concerned because the book made it sound like I'd be rebuilding the oven every other year almost. It seems like that hasn't been the case with yours.

Yeah that plunge door looks interesting. I need to get myself a little stick welder I think so I can build something.
I agree the glass view port isn't necessary. I'm fine eliminating it. My goals for this are baking bread (450F ish) and canning/simmering fruit. I bake bread weekly but only can in batches when fruit is available. I haven't really figured out how to modify the rocket stove design to handle canning + baking. It seems like the walker style stove is more geared towards that. The walker stove seems pretty inexpensive if I can salvage a door and the cooktops. Roughly in the $600ish range. I think a rocket stove could be cheaper if I could figure out how to change the design to canning + baking

Awesome! I'm thinking about doing the same thing with a walker stove for an outdoor kitchen. I think my biggest concern at the moment is that the batch box doors seem to be really expensive to buy. I'm cruising craigslist to look for broken electric stoves with a glass cooktop.

Sounds amazing! Please post some pictures. Where about in southern oregon are you located?